


A Single Shadow

by Ghoul_King



Category: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms
Genre: Calm protagonist, Gen, mad science magic, zelda as protagonist
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-25
Updated: 2018-09-13
Packaged: 2019-07-02 04:02:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 28,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15788559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ghoul_King/pseuds/Ghoul_King
Summary: Every generation has its hero and villain. Not this one. This one needs a shadow.





	1. Chapter 1: Start of Darkness

An inhuman shriek erupted from somewhere lower in the tower, and Zelda's manservant, Link, wordlessly shouted in response.

 

Of  _course_  whatever this issue was would interrupt her first attempts to study Hyrule's newest stellar feature. Of course.

 

\--------------------------------------------------

 

When Zelda arrived with a firespitter rod in hand, she was puzzled to find that a bizarre, vaguely Moblinoid creature was looming over Link's fallen body. A quick glance showed that his body held no marks worse than a bruise, no blood or cuts, not even any damage to his clothing. A closer look at the creature showed it had more in common with a (spectacularly ugly) deer than with a Moblin or a pig, with antlers and a long face. Its appearance didn't ring any bells, and it glowed slightly with an arcane light, suggesting an artificial origin.

 

Zelda frowned, unused to being unfamiliar with anything to do with her art.

 

Whatever the creature was, it had somehow achieved victory over Link, who was the greatest man with a blade in all of Hyrule, as he shoved in her face with his smug silence every time he won a tourney of the sword. His gear was well-made and enhanced with Zelda's own art, as well. This struck Zelda as troubling.

 

As such, rather than using the firespitter rod on the thing, she triggered the tower's Phantom defenders. Standard setting: if it's inside the tower and moving, and it's not on the “safe” list, kill it.

 

It was honestly disappointing how easily the creature was reduced to a shrieking, sobbing wreck. Oddly, it brandished a marble at the Phantoms, seeming to expect this to defend it from its attackers, and became quite visibly horrified when nothing happened. Zelda stepped back out of sight, just in case, until the dull thump of maces into flesh ceased, indicating that the thing had been beaten into unconsciousness. Probably.

 

\---------------------------------------------------------

 

The creature claimed to be an assassin when questioned, here to work its Master's will in ending a 'crucial' life. Zelda was honestly surprised it was equipped to speak at all. It also said, quite stridently, that nothing Zelda could do would extract anything further from it.

 

Zelda took that as a challenge and set the hot coals to burning.

 

\-----------------------------------------------------------------

 

The assassin's boasts had proven empty, and it had been reduced to a sobbing wreck in a matter of hours. Zelda hadn't even needed to get creative. A pity.

 

Unfortunately, pathetic as the creature was, it knew essentially nothing. Its master had formed it only days ago and assigned it its target without the assassin ever catching a glimpse of this distant creator. The creature didn't even realize that it had removed Link's soul rather than outright killing him, and certainly didn't know why its master had wanted a simple butler dead. Certainly, he was  _also_  the greatest swordsman in the land, but he was just one man.

 

This was surprising, admittedly. Zelda had assumed she was the target and Link was collateral damage. Even if her royal heritage meant little in these times, she was still someone of importance, while Link was... the manservant. Curious. What kind of foe would expend the effort to mold an assassin from nothing to slay her servant? Why take his soul when it was far easier to stick a knife between his ribs?

 

These questions nagged at her, so much so she found herself unable to focus on her work. Even dissecting the assassin kept the thoughts at bay only a few short hours. In the end she made plans to backtrack the creature to its original entry point into Hyrule, starting with animating her backup assistant -a doll fashioned such that it took her likeness when active, originally made with vague notions it would act as a body double, back in her more paranoid years- and having the doll assist her in carting Link's inconsiderately heavy body down the tower and into his wagon.

 

Then they had to wrangle Link's horse. The escapades involved shall not be shared with the gentle readers, for Zelda would never admit to being outsmarted by a dumb animal even once, let alone twice or thrice, but readers may be assured that in the end the princess remembered the tune Link often hummed to calm or call his horse. This considerably simplified matters... though why the doll was able to earn the beast's trust where the princess's noble bearing was met with suspicion does not bear thinking about.

 

From there the wagon was hitched to the animal, loaded down with supplies for a journey of indeterminate length, and the twin-like girls were underway to the nearby ranch whence Link's paramour peasant girl dwelt. Not that there was anything wrong with two peasants forming such a relationship, of course, but it was still a topic Zelda preferred to contemplate as little as possible. Sometimes Zelda wished Link were the kind of man who slept with every pretty face -his cherubic face when reminiscing about this "Malon" was vaguely sickening.

 

Perhaps it was for the best, though, as it gave Zelda a reasonably secure place to store her manservant's body. It was possible that his soul had been obliterated entirely, but not likely, being both even more difficult than stealing a soul and, on balance, less useful than taking it for your own use. No, Zelda suspected Link's soul was out there somewhere, in which case it would not do to have her manservant rendered permanently unavailable from neglect of his body killing it. It would be vexing to get his soul back to no benefit. This was already becoming rather a lot of effort.

 

The situation proved easily explained to the redheaded peasant. The only difficulty was in convincing her that an outside force had caused Link's current distress, and not some experiment of Zelda's, as the ranch girl had apparently heard  _stories_  from Link. Making a mental note to have  _words_  with Link once the boy was usable again, Zelda argued quite logically that she wouldn't bother to make up a story about incompetent assassins if it was a lab accident, as she certainly didn't care what Link's lover thought of her. The girl found this a compelling argument and ceased bothering Zelda with her ridiculous accusations -or perhaps was too revolted by Zelda's attitude to pursue further conversation. Either or.

 

With Link's body bespelled and stored in the harlot's room -Zelda assumed unsavory intent and put the details out of her mind- it was time to follow the assassin's trail. This required a second round of singing to soothe Link's horse -Epaulet or some such- as it had, for reasons inexplicable, decided to become uncooperative again. Fortunately, the doll was perfectly able to handle this odious task, brushing a hand through the horse's mane and murmuring nonsense softly. Once calmed in this way, hooking it up to the wagon and continuing down the road was simple.

 

It came as little surprise that the assassin's trail, a distinctive, shall we say,  _flavor_  of soulstuff and magic, followed the main road. The deer-ish creature would've left a Moblin ashamed to be associated with its lack of subtlety, Zelda was sure, as it clearly never thought to cover its trail or take a more difficult route. Zelda's contempt for the creature's creator grew over the three days it took to reach Hyrule Castle Town (For even with the royalty removed from power, the castle remained a fixture, politically and militarily useful) as it became obvious that the creature had never stopped to rest. If one was skilled enough to design such a cunningly made body, why curse it with such lacking intellect?

 

Perhaps some talented neophyte not yet wise in the ways of the world.

 

Regardless, the trail ultimately took Zelda directly in front of the Temple of Time. This brought her to a halt. The Temple was sacred. Zelda wasn't big on religion, but it was indisputable fact that the Temple's grounds were protected against the darker arts and would indeed cause even well-meaning or naive uses of such to fizzle. The creature  _couldn't_  have been constructed on the Temple's grounds, certainly not within the structure!

 

Yet a quick circle around the ground showed that the creature's trail did not continue past the structure. If it hadn't been made within the temple, it must've been covering its trail with devious skill until it reached the temple, and simply stopped doing so after passing through the structure, which seemed an absurd prospect. Even if some enchantment on it had been broken by the Temple's protections as it passed through, if it had ever had any intention of stealth it wouldn't have stalked along the main road openly, as its trail clearly showed it had! Magical travel would've left its own distinctive markers, and none were present, except older signs that had been there for as long as Zelda had known how to sense such.

 

Impossible as it was, the creature  _had_  to have somehow been birthed within the Temple.

 

Leaving the Doll to manage the horse and watch the cart, Zelda entered the Temple. It was only after she'd passed the threshold that it occurred to her that there should've been pilgrims and other worshipers in the area... and only because the atmosphere inside the Temple was so obviously wrong. For starters, none of the sun's light was making it in through the stained glass windows: the inside of the building was, in fact, plunged in a near-absolute darkness, studded by twinkling lights in a seemingly random patchwork of constellations. It was as if the night sky had taken residence within the Temple.

 

The effect itself was unsettling, the implications far worse... nor could Zelda sense the holy aura that normally washed over her when entering. The Temple's protections were gone somehow, which bode especially ill. Tyrants and malicious sorcerers might try to take the Temple for themselves, but not even the worst of people would have cause to attempt to break these protections, nor would they have the means. If the texts were to be believed, the King of Evil himself had never broken its protections -bypassed according to at least one story, but not  _broken_.

 

The involuntary gasp Zelda let out in response was noticed, to her dismay. Three of the constellations shifted, rising into a vaguely human form, the dots of light growing larger, presumably approaching. Zelda was  _not_  prepared for combat of any sort, not here, not now, and fell back. The relief she felt at feeling the sun washing over her was matched only by how she felt when the clusters of light refused to move beyond their unnatural darkness in pursuit of her, standing seemingly just beyond the threshold. The sounds they made as they moved... odd. Very odd.

 

Zelda backed away to the wagon without taking her eyes off the Temple entryway, and bade the Doll retrieve one of her rods. One was passed to her in short order, and a quick glance confirmed that it was a simple firespitter rod. Limited usage before it had to be bathed in flame again, but potent, and fire would almost certainly be useful in unnatural shadows. The star-creatures themselves may well be harmed by the light, too. Further, the rod itself was one of the heavier ones in Zelda's arsenal, and so would be a passable tool for beating the things to death if they proved susceptible to such.

 

She approached with caution, but the pinpricks of light remained motionless. Even standing a few handspans away elicited no response. One tongue of flame later, and a mess of motion was ongoing, with a burning humanoid figure lunging at Zelda while constellations ducked to the sides of the door. Startled, Zelda reflexively brought the rod up to block a swing, wincing at how the sword -wait, sword?- bit into the rod's wooden body. Backing away from the flaming, groaning creature, which thankfully was flailing aimlessly and beating uselessly at its body, apparently unable to find Zelda past that initial lunge, she assessed it.

 

A Stalfos. Odd. Stalfos weren't known for their flammability. Zelda backed away further.  _If something is behaving unexpectedly, it's not safe._  True in the lab, true in life. To her consternation, the Stalfos abandoned its sword and shield in favor of beating at the flames, which were dying out on their own and seemed unaffected by its hands. Zelda considered bidding the Doll to get her a different rod, but then she noticed motes of light drifting away from the Stalfos -and then it stamping them until they ceased glowing. She backed away further, very puzzled.

 

A full minute passed before the flames died down enough for Zelda to see the Stalfos with complete clarity. It became obvious that it wasn't trying to put out the fire, and possibly never had been -it was covered by a black powder studded with yellow-white or blue-white chunks of some material which seemed to glow with an inner light, and the Stalfos was deliberately removing the stuff. The glowing bits it endeavored to destroy once they were removed.

 

When it was done, it grabbed its gear before turning to face Zelda and she jerked back a step and back on guard, having not even noticed that her guard had dropped. To her surprise it snapped a salute with the hand holding the jagged sword, only barely avoiding smacking itself with the blade, and then sank right into the dirt and grass in an instant.

 

… something  _very_  odd was going on here, and it wasn't a neophyte getting in over their head.

 

Zelda looked around, suddenly seeing the lack of pilgrims in a new light. Indeed, the entire area around the Temple was essentially abandoned, and appeared to have been abandoned for a while. Zelda noted discolorations marking the grounds, consistent with old bloodstains.

 

Zelda found herself wondering how many of the Stalfos had been “recruited” by the original infestation.

 

A glance at the sun reassured her that she had several hours before nightfall. This was good, as it was likely that the Stalfos would be free to travel where they pleased at night, barring perhaps wards against casual intrusion. For the moment they were bottled up, and she had time to plan.

 

Zelda returned to the wagon, thinking about what supplies she'd need for this...

 

\---------------------------------------------------------

 

An effigy to draw out the spirit, lines of power drawn with the Doll's aid into the ground and onto the effigy, and a sacrifice of fairy dust later, Zelda had a Phantom ready to fight for her. Not practical for most purposes, except as a guard, as the effigy could neither be moved nor would the Phantom remain if the effigy came to substantial harm, and the Phantom was unable to move beyond a leash range defined by the effigy's location, but here and now Zelda had the hour and a half to spare and an uncertain-but-large number of Stalfos to purge.

 

She certainly wasn't going to get into a fight with another one herself.

 

The Phantom would not understand complex instructions, but that was fine. All it needed to do was walk straight into the building and attack anything that attacked it. The other Stalfos would almost certainly pile onto it the instant it crossed the threshold, and were unlikely to be carrying the tools necessary to crack its unnatural shell. At worst they might disrupt the connection to the effigy, effectively stunning it for a moment.

 

Zelda sat herself down to wait, once the Phantom was complete, and bade the Doll prepare her a light dinner from the rations on hand. It was a bit early, perhaps, but she did not expect to be in a mood for a meal when the proper time came.

 

She did her best to ignore the foolish children pestering her about what she was doing, only acknowledging them to assure them that their suffering would be legendary should they in any way interfere with the effigy or its lines of power.

 

Irritatingly, the Doll distracting them with the horse (“This is Epona. She likes children, don't you Epona?”) worked better to keep them away.

 

Zelda sniffed to herself and ate in (relative) silence.

 

\------------------------------------------------------------------

 

For the first thirty minutes there had been a riot of clanging and Stalfos war cries -or so she assumed their outraged noises were intended as- from within the Temple, which had then petered out into more intermittent sounds of battle.

 

At the hour mark there had been 5 minutes of silence, when abruptly the effigy burst into golden flames and the lines of power glowed white-hot and then smoothed out, as if they had never been. (The urchins cheered this as “fireworks”, to Zelda's irritation)

 

Disturbed, Zelda set aside a partially eaten apple, and didn't even admonish the urchin that snatched it up immediately. Even if something inside the Temple were able to defeat the Phantom's protections, that was a spectacularly violent feedback reaction from its anchor. Zelda had been prepared for the possibility of the effigy splitting down the middle, or of the lines of power configuring themselves into a different arcane symbol if the loyalty had been stolen from her -she would've disrupted it with a swipe of her foot if that had happened- but she'd never  _heard_  of anything like this, let alone seen it for herself.

 

While she had the supplies for another Phantom -for another ten of the things, even- she found it unlikely that a second or even third would do any better than the first against whatever this was. She didn't have the time to produce a larger team, either -there was roughly an hour or so until sunset, and likely the Stalfos captain or whatever was commanding the troop would leave the Temple grounds the instant night fell.

 

Unfortunate. This called for a personal touch -and a hope that whatever had defeated the Phantom had done so on the basis of arcane technique, not martial ability.

 

Zelda collected three of her rods -the firespitter, a lightning rod, and a shadow pulser- and walked in, ignoring the cheering (and betting) the children were engaging in.

 

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

It had been Zelda's expectation that the Temple would be lightened by the removal of many (all?) of the Stalfos, but remain a darkened place thanks to the influence of the master creature.

 

Instead, it was wholly radiant.

 

Zelda winced and shaded her eyes with one hand, careful to not activate the firespitter rod held in it. This was  _absurd_. Before, the Temple had been utterly absent of light, aside from pinpricks of star-like glows, and now when nightfall was approaching  _outside,_ the  _inside_  of the Temple was bathed in a golden light as if the sun was shining utterly unobstructed into it at high noon.

 

Zelda did her best to look around for more Stalfos in spite of the torture of feeling like she was looking almost directly into the sun. She could find none of them among the pews and empty spaces, and indeed the only motion that caught her eyes was that of the stained glass windows appearing to -no, actually the imagery  _was_  moving.

 

It took Zelda a moment to realize the windows were not the usual set. She wasn't entirely certain what story  _was_  being told, but it wasn't the canonical one. Three fanged, horned parodies of the Goddesses? Really? And... was that the King of Evil being depicted atop a clock tower, catching a falling moon and then hurling it away, again and again? Four towering figures seemed to be trying to pull at the sky from somewhere beyond the King of Evil, in that image. Zelda found herself disturbed, though she couldn't say exactly why.

 

Whatever force had taken the Temple, it was perverse indeed.

 

As her eyes adjusted to the blinding glare, Zelda carefully moved through the pews, keeping an eye out. The being would have to be on-site to maintain such an effect. It was honestly surprising she hadn't seen it already, though perhaps it was hiding in the priest's personal chambers. Zelda found herself in front of the pulpit before anything happened, and she wasn't prepared for it when it did happen.

 

Another Zelda unfolded from behind the pulpit, far too large to have hidden behind it, yet somehow she had. She had a bow slung over one shoulder, a quiver of arrows with golden feathers, and strapped to her side, scabbardless, was a rusted, jagged sword. Otherwise she was resplendent, dressed like a true royal at the height of their glory, only with more gold than even that. The sword struck Zelda as jarringly out of place, not only for how poorly maintained it seemed to be but also for how it appeared to eat the light around it, leaving it shrouded in gray shadows when all else in the building was illuminated from every direction by golden light.

 

The other Zelda spoke, and it was strident, pealingly clarion, and had the tone of someone who was used to speaking and being heard. “Vile servant of the Goddesses made in mockery of my image, I will strike you down!”

 

The true Zelda was dumbstruck. A thousand responses ran through her head, starting with “I don't think the Goddesses are  _real_ ”, but nothing came from her mouth. The absurdity of the situation -the idea that whoever had made this farce  _had_  made it- was too much for her. Anybody who could pull this off... why would they  _bother_? It struck Zelda as a prank in poor humor, only it had cost people their lives.

 

Then the other Zelda drew her bow and smoothly notched a glowing, golden arrow, and the true Zelda reflexively threw herself to one side into the pews, wincing from the violent release of golden energies when the arrow struck the pew in front of her. Zelda noted that if the pew had not been in the way, the arrow would have embedded itself in her right eye.

 

She knew this because the point was a handspan away from her eye, jutting through the wood.

 

She inferred that dodging alone would avail her nothing against this mockery, and began to plan accordingly.

 

“Cowardly filth!” the mockery spat -literally spat, Zelda  _heard_ the glob of saliva strike the floor. “Just like the servants of evil to hide in the shadows!”  _What is wrong with this_ ** _thing's_** _creator_ , thought Zelda.

 

Since dodging would do her no good, and her enemy had a sword and probably knew how to use it comparably well to that bow, that left... er.

 

Zelda manipulated the lightning rod to a usually ill-advised configuration and chucked it over the pew toward where she'd last heard the mockery. She was rewarded for her effort with an outraged shriek following the thunderclap of the rod vaporizing. This sounded good on the face of things, until it devolved into angry cursing rather than screams of agony.

 

Goddesses, a  _Goron_  would've been at least stunned by that.

 

A peek over the pew showed that the mockery was considerably less regal in visage, holes torn in its dress and scorch marks marring its skin in places, but it did not seem to be in considerable pain. A construct, made in her image?... no, Zelda noted it  _was_  bleeding from its eyes and ears. Curiously, she also noted that patches of its skin were colored differently, and it was only now that she noticed that the unmarred skin was an unnatural golden hue. It  _glittered_ , too, which had not caught her eye before.

 

The sword was missing, as well. Zelda was frankly unsure how that could've happened, but she approved.

 

She lunged over the pew to the next row before her ridiculous doppelganger noticed her. Bizarrely, the sword was right  _there_ , and indeed her left hand landed upon its handle and closed around it, seemingly by chance.

 

Zelda did not trust chance, and narrowed her eyes at the suddenly suspicious blade.

 

“VILLAIN! You will not mock justice any longer!”

 

On the other hand, any port in a storm.

 

The mockery click-click-clicked down the center row, and Zelda was astonished to realize that the thing was running in  _high heels_. How?  _Why?_  Regardless, it meant she knew exactly when it was to reach her row, and lunged inexpertly in an attempt to plant the ugly blade in its throat.

 

Unfortunately, the mockery had its bow angled to put an arrow into her eye and let fly as  _it_  turned the corner. Much more fortunately, Zelda's ungainly attack slammed the sword's side into the bow, knocking it off course and causing one of the stained glass windows to suffer the full force of the arrow's outpouring of golden energies. The other Zelda was so obviously affronted the true Zelda had to fight a momentary, uncharacteristic urge to laugh.

 

This urge was ended when one high-heeled foot cracked across her forehead. Almost immediately blood started pouring over her eyes. Also, it hurt, though less than Zelda had always assumed a blow to the head would.

 

Barely seeing motion through the blood, Zelda swung blindly toward what she suspected was another kick, but the mockery danced back, making a  _tut_ ing sound, like a disappointed schoolmarm. Zelda staggered to her feet, but then abandoned any notions of regaining her balance when she saw the mockery nocking another of those horrid golden arrows, aborting her attempt to stand straight in favor of a graceless lunge.

 

To both Zeldas' surprise, the rusted blade passed right through the bow to seemingly no effect, before the bow abruptly fell apart and slapped into the mockery's face thanks to the string's tension. “Oh you  _didn't!_  How  _dare_  you, filth! You'll pay for that!” the mockery spat, slapping aside the suddenly burning remnants of the bow and shrugging off the quiver in favor of pulling a sheaf of knives from seemingly nowhere and throwing them at Zelda's face. Zelda was becoming vaguely annoyed at the mockery's obsession with her face, even as she intellectually appreciated that it was trying to kill her efficiently.

 

She also noted that the knives appeared to be of a historical Sheikan make. This was odd, as the Sheikah had not been heard from in more than three centuries.

 

Regardless, she attempted to block with the sword and dodge with her body at the same time, and the uncoordinated result was that she sort of flopped backward. There was the sound of metal ringing against metal, but Zelda couldn't see what had happened -the blood had truly blinded her. She attempted to wipe at it to no avail. Abruptly the firespitter rod was jerked out the hand not holding the sword, and justifiably alarmed (“Heh, let's see how  _you_  like it!”) she swung the sword out at where she heard the mockery.

 

She hit  _something_  (“Aw, no fair no fair! I was going to use that!”) but quite clearly the mockery was not dead, and Zelda was still blind. This was not a state of affairs that could be allowed to continue. Zelda backed away (“ _COWARD!”_ ) and pulled the shadow pulser from where it was strapped to her back, and thumbed -it was ripped out of her hand as well. (“Nya nya, mine now!”)

 

Zelda fell back into a guard position, feeling quite certain she was about to die, desperately trying to wipe the blood from her eyes and blot out the mockery's mockery.  _The manservant's services were not worth dying for_.

 

It seemed a poor last thought.

 

Then the mockery exploded just as Zelda was able to see a little bit. The shockwave of dark energies seemed to part around Zelda, the sword shaking in her hand. It took a moment for Zelda to be certain the mockery had, in fact, exploded.

 

That was not a result that made sense.

 

Nonetheless, it was apparently what had happened. On approaching the scorch mark where the mockery had been standing, there was... well, there was a scorch mark. The pulser was twisted and burned as well, with a clear handprint marking out the worst of the damage.

 

Very odd.

 

Zelda wiped the blood from her eyes again, frustrated. At least she was done with this place, apparently, though it had not been as informative as it should have been. Perhaps investigating the sword-

 

Zelda looked up and found herself facing a hooded and cloaked figure holding a scythe, quite clearly floating a full handspan above the ground.

 

Zelda dropped back into a guard position, finding herself perversely glad that Link had forced her to learn the basics of swordplay so he could have a sometimes-sparring partner. She noted the hooded figure was covered in a glittering dust.  _What is with these things and glitter?_

 

The thing swung, and Zelda ducked. Astonishingly, it worked. The figure locked into a finishing position, and did not naturally return to a ready stance. Instead it hung there, twitching. Confused, but deciding to take advantage of the opportunity, Zelda swung at the body of the figure with the sword, ready to back away the instant it reacted.

 

This turned out to be a good plan, as the instant her sword touched it glitter sprayed everywhere and, more importantly, the figure twitched violently and swung its scythe in an arc no Hylian could've managed, only missing her neck because she had backed off as best she could already. It twitched in place several more times in a matter of moments and then jerked in a swing so ungainly Zelda would have expected it from a drunken farmer. It didn't come anywhere near her, and left it entirely open to another swing.

 

She half-suspected a trap of some kind, but having already resigned herself to death and only not died because... Goddesses only knew... Zelda felt she might as well take the opening, and swung her sword again. It caught briefly on the thing's fabric, and this time she noticed that everywhere the sword's strange shadow passed over, the glittering dust on the thing was repelled.

 

The time spent on noticing this allowed the thing to slice her right arm open, artery spurting blood.

 

_Ah yes, I **am**  dead. Now I shall bleed out, success or fail._

_The butler is **not worth this**._

 

Zelda soldiered on anyway, too stubborn to admit defeat at a clearly inferior intellect's hands.  _The cloaked creature would have to earn her death_. She would not simply give it to the thing.

 

She swung again, not even trying to exploit an opening this time. Bizarrely, the thing locked up into a rictus of seeming pain, allowing her blade to strike true. More dust was shed, and the thing's left arm began flailing purposely, throwing off its balance. She swung again, and it lurched directly into her blade. Puzzled in the extreme, she swung  _again_ , waiting for the thing to attack. It made a pathetic attempt, but it was so off-target the haft slapped into her head while the blade touched nothing. Her sword struck directly under the cowl, and everything went still.

 

… and very,  _very_  dark.

 

Wind began to blow, a cold, biting wind, and the dust covering the figure was carried away by it, flickering out like a candle blown out as it went. The figure shuddered and twitched with incredible violence, but it suddenly grasped its scythe in both hands and hunched over, driving her blade deeper into its (face?), somehow failing to cause the sword to come out the other side of its hood. The wind picked up, the world grew dimmer, and the Temple faded away, leaving Zelda standing in a seemingly endless field of fog, continuing to grow darker as the glittering dust was sucked off the cloak.

 

Finally everything grew still and silent. Zelda was unsure what had just happened. The sucking sound as the thing pulled itself off her blade clarified nothing.

 

One of the thing's bony hands pulled away into its sleeve and then popped back out holding a large green... coin? Whatever it was, the being flipped it toward Zelda. She was quite surprised when she caught it with her wounded arm -and even more surprised when the blood flowed back into her artery and a sharp un-pain occurred simultaneous to the cut sealing shut, as if nothing had ever happened to her arm. The blood on her face sucked back into the cut on her forehead, and the same weird, sharp un-pain was there too. A look at the object in her hand showed that it was some kind of green crystal cut into the shape of a coin or medal, sized to fit comfortably into her closed palm. The side facing up depicted a complex image she couldn't entirely parse, but it seemed to include a tree, possibly a Deku Tree given it seemed to include a simple, highly stylized face. In the oldest tongue the outside edge had one word repeating.

 

_Time._

 

Utterly baffled, Zelda glanced back up and found herself facing a legion of Stalfos, the cloaked figure nowhere to be seen. A literal legion, standing in formation with a single larger Stalfos standing at the right-front of the group. Before she could prep herself for a fight, all the Stalfos saluted her and belted out gibberish.

 

Where her hand touched the medal, it tingled, and she heard the low roar of a thousand voices saying  _We salute your Courage, your Wisdom, and your Power! You have our thanks, Lady._  All said in unison.

 

Then it all -the Stalfos, the fog, the infinite darkness in every direction- faded away, leaving Zelda standing in the Temple of Time, now utterly ordinary -except for the hum of the holy wards singing on her skin.

 

All was as it should be, though not at all how Zelda had expected it to be.

 

Unable to process exactly what had just occurred, Zelda opted to put it out of her mind. The important things were the assassin's trail and the baffling, rusted sword she now carried. She noted it was still eating light, though it wasn't so stark now that the light was that of the setting sun filtered through stained glass -a quick glance showed that the correct images were now occupying them, and no longer moving- rather than that bizarre golden glow.

 

Zelda was puzzled to find the assassin's trail ended in the very back of the Temple, in the room legend said the Master Sword awaited the Hero's hands, right at the Stone that the Blade of Evil's Bane was said to rest within. There was no sword, of cour...

 

… Zelda glanced at the blade in her hand. The rusted, pitted, ugly thing cloaked in shadow... and yet its crossguard matched the Master Sword's design as depicted in literally every piece of religious art that had ever existed, and its color was the shade of blue described in texts, the shade in fact  _named_  after its crossguard's color. This was not compelling proof, but-

 

Well, there was one fairly obvious test. The Stone would accept no blade except the Master Sword's, supposedly, and the Stone was no figment of imagination and did indeed reject the rare attempt to test a sword by inserting it.

 

Somewhat reluctantly, Zelda approached the Stone. With no small amount of dread, she attempted to insert this wreck of a blade that had, admittedly, saved her life repeatedly today. It went in smoothly.  _Too_  smoothly -the blade itself was far from smooth. It  _clicked_ , like a key mated to its lock.

 

Then the room lit up -six symbols all around the Stone that Zelda had not paid attention to prior, specifically. Or... actually, only five of them did, glowing with an inner light. The sixth one instead had  _time_  circle it in the oldest tongue, marked out in letters of pitch black.

 

Okay. So. Apparently this rusted wreck  _was_  the Master Sword.

 

Zelda was uncertain what to make of the exact meaning of all this, but  _something_  of significance was in front of her.

 

A glance around showed that the far wall had an abstract representation of a door carved into it, glowing with a radiant light. Nothing else stood out.

 

Zelda frowned, and removed the Sword from the Stone. It left as smoothly as it had entered, and the various glows faded -including the carving of a door, leaving nothing visible at all on the wall- and the black lettering dissolved in response. Zelda pursed her lips and glanced at the Sword. She couldn't quite shake the feeling that it was projecting innocence, a vibe of  _Who, me?_  in response. The Master Sword was not held by myth to be a thinking artifact...

 

… but it certainly wasn't a  _dumb_  one.

 

Zelda scowled at the Sword, but took it with her when she left. It was strange how it hung at her side easily, still without a scabbard, as it had hung by the doppleganger's side. She didn't even have a belt. Zelda knew of no magic to allow a tool to hang from nothing specifically prepared... though if it was truly a creation of the Goddesses, that wasn't surprising.

 

Zelda hadn't thought they were real, but now she wasn't so sure.

 

Zelda barely even noticed the cheering urchins as she made her way back to the wagon. Her thoughts were on finding an inn to stay the night in relative safety, and on figuring out how to track the assassin back to its creator now that the trail had dead-ended quite nonsensically. Absentmindedly, she said, “Horse, to the Smoky Grog,” as she swung the reins.

 

The horse said,  _“Sure, your majesty,”_ with the intense sarcasm of the long-suffering as it began to trot.

 

Zelda stared.


	2. Chapter 2: Simmering Flame

Zelda did her best to ignore the horse's (ongoing) muttering. She would sleep, and wake up refreshed and ready and  _not hearing imagined animal speech_.

 

Thankfully, the Smoky Grog was not too far away, and the innkeeper was more than happy to put up Zelda for the night. Zelda assigned the Doll to handle getting the horse settled and to watch the wagon for the night. While overall an inferior servant to Link, the Doll didn't need to sleep, so this was something it would do well.

 

Zelda spent an hour or so writing notes, first by torchlight coming in from the window and then benefiting from a candle she lit herself. Zelda was especially interested in her strange doppelganger -how had it been made, and  _why_  had it been made in her image? Her first guess was that it was a trap patterned after whoever crossed the threshold or some such, but the mockery hadn't been all that similar in temperament or abilities.

 

Zelda had never so much as picked up a bow in her life.

 

So that seemed unlikely of a theory, but she was unsure what to replace it with.

 

She also studied the sword as best she could, in no small part because no one had  _reacted_  to it hanging from her side in its strange way. That was not natural. There was also basic curiosity, of course -what were the exact parameters of its light “eating” effect? What was the purpose of this, and what were its limitations? Why was it rusted, if it was the Blade of Evil's Bane, which required no blacksmith to maintain it? Especially curious was that Zelda eventually noticed that, though it “ate” light, she could see into this darkened space perfectly... yet her nighttime sight seemed no better than it was before she picked the blasted thing up.

 

It all bore thought, and Zelda was aggravated when she was forced to cut short her writing because she was nodding off.

 

\-----------------------------------------------------------

 

Zelda awoke refreshed, alert, and, dare she say? Happy.

 

The horse spoke when she entered the inn's stables. ("Oh great, the mean one is awake")

 

There went that good mood.

 

Having slept on it, Zelda had new ideas for how she might follow the soulthief's trail back to its master. (“Assassin” no longer felt appropriate to describe the creature) Zelda did not believe it had been  _created_  in the Temple of Time, as she had not found any traces to suggest a ritual of note had occurred on the grounds. It seemed more likely that its trail continued, and that she had simply not considered the full range of possibilities.

 

In this case, she was thinking of that doorway that had been visible while the Master Sword was planted into the Stone. It was said in some legends that the Sacred Realm was accessed from the Temple of Time... it unsettled Zelda to imagine the soulthief coming from the Sacred Realm, and not just because she now had reason to believe the Goddesses were real. If the Sacred Realm was indeed both real and a faraway realm, akin to Holodrum or Termina, then any path from it not taking natural paths needs must involve tremendous power, far beyond anything Zelda would expect even a talented master of her craft to be able to gather unnoticed.

 

Of course, if the “Door of Time” was real and such a natural path, than things would be less concerning... probably.

 

The idea of the soulthief's master  _living_  in the Sacred Realm was its own brand of alarming, after all.

 

Regardless, Zelda headed to the Temple of Time a second time. To her surprise it still was not crowded. Her expectation had been that word would have gotten around in short order. Strange, but convenient. As such, she set up for a ritual to find  _connections_  between the Temple of Time and elsewhere. Most likely the Soulthief had somehow been transported along such a connection. Thus, finding and following connections would substitute for trailing the creature's path more directly, in bringing her to its master.

 

Unsurprisingly, there were a fairly large number of powerful connections, but five stood out in particular, thrumming with energy. One of them had a similar... what Zelda thought of as  _taste_ , a similar taste to the soulthief's energies. There were a number of reasons why that might be the case, but for lack of any better ideas Zelda decided to follow this trail. Hopefully no further traps would stand in her way.

 

The connection went west, directly toward Death Mountain.

 

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

It took a week to reach the base of the mountain, periodically checking for the connection -having bound a stone on a string to align with the connection for this purpose- to make sure she was on track... and also in hopes that Death Mountain was  _not_  the endpoint. Unfortunately, this hope was not to be. The trail wound thither and yon enough that Zelda could triangulate the connection's endpoint, and it was not some place far past Death Mountain -it was the mountain itself, or a place very near it. Perhaps the ruins of Old Kakariko? Or mayhap the Tower of Hera -well, the remains of it.

 

Whatever the case, what Zelda found at the foot of the mountain was not anything she'd expected. A camp of Lizalfos was unheard of, however crude it might be, as Lizalfos were cavern creatures and lava lovers. Even stranger was the wooden arch marking the “entrance” to the camp, which said -in the oldest tongue- “Away From Home”.

 

Lizalfos were usually jealously territorial creatures, so much so the ancients had believed them to be evil guardians set by dark masters. It didn't help that they were fond of gold and jewelry and sometimes actually  _were_  paid to guard a location by less scrupulous sorts. As such, Zelda stopped the wagon out of sight and sent the Doll ahead to scout. If it “died”, well... perhaps her ten Phantoms worth of materials would be put to use.

 

She busied herself with simple tea, using smokeless fire to boil the water, and gathered some of the more convenient worthwhiles in the area while waiting for the water to boil, making another pass once the tea was gone. No fairy dust, alas, but Death Mountain had some interesting mushrooms she was always in short supply of, since the area was considered by most to be a dead zone, not fit for habitation, not safe to travel.

 

She grew bored well before the Doll returned, but her brooch indicated the Doll was completely fine, aside from the usual stresses involved in walking. It was when she was considering a nap that she finally sighted the Doll approaching.

 

The Doll's report was interesting -the Lizalfos  _spoke_  the oldest tongue, and once they had been informed that the Doll was the agent of another had expressed an interest in meeting this master, or so the Doll claimed. The Doll's fluency in the spoken form of the oldest tongue was Zelda's own fluency, and while she could read the texts well enough -sometimes better than the scribbling of modern “writers”- she'd never had cause to practice the spoken form. Her fluency was largely theoretical, and thus so too was the Doll's.

 

Even so, most of the Lizalfos had been unarmed and unarmored, many apparently herding Dodongos for their own mysterious reasons and others tending to the mundanities of everyday living. The only armed Lizalfos the Doll had seen had been twofold -a ring of guards at the opposite side of the camp, facing the mountain, and a hunter returning with a deer carcass. Nor had the greeter taken offense at the Doll's presence.

 

Curious. Very curious.

 

Zelda decided the risk was low, and now she was interested in the camp for its own sake, in addition to her prior reason for passing through. As such, she bade the Doll direct the wagon to the camp.

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

The camp was even cruder up close, and the written word was everywhere, surprising Zelda. Literacy was never common among the masses, and the oldest tongue was not a Lizalfos invention. As far as Zelda had read, they didn't write at all, preferring verbal agreements and the occasional mutual child hostage. Virtually everything written suggested a  _temporariness_  to the camp, as if the Lizalfos expected to either replace everything with something more permanent or pack up and leave. Nonetheless, the writing had the weathering of years in most cases. Only the Dodongo pen's signs were fresh, and they were various warnings on what  _not_  to do with Dodongos -and if Zelda was reading them correctly, they were aimed at the children of the camp.

 

There was indeed a Lizalfos greeter standing -lazing, really- just behind the wooden arch. It waved in a manner most jovial on sighting Zelda and her wagon, though it paid far more attention to the horse after this initial greeting, seeming fascinated to see the animal.

 

Zelda found herself wondering if it, too, understood the horse's near-constant muttering and sarcasm, and then went straight back to pretending she heard no such thing.

 

The Doll pulled the wagon to a halt just before the archway, and greeted the Lizalfos in the oldest tongue, calling it  _Skytongue_  and offending Zelda with its casual friendliness to the creature. Then the Lizalfos opened its mouth, and spoke clearly in the modern tongue with no accent whatsoever.

 

Zelda felt a tingling from a pouch on her dress where she kept the green medal she'd been given at the Temple of Time, distracting her from its bizarrely understandable words.

 

“... two knife-ears in one day, the first in so long! Your servant didn't say when I asked -did you hear of our plight from one of the travelers?”

 

Zelda blinked, puzzled, and glanced at the Doll with a frown, wondering if it was playing some ill-conceived joke on her. Before the delay in her response had passed the point of rudeness, she returned her attention to the Lizalfos greeter -Skytongue, apparently- and spoke in plain Hylian herself, saying “No, I have not heard of your camp before today, though I have read extensively on your people. I am passing through on business that will take me to Death Mountain.”

 

Skytongue's response was strange. Instead of answering Zelda directly, he -Skytongue very distinctly sounded like a he, and Zelda could distantly hear Lizalfos speaking in feminine tones- turned to the camp and called out “Ho, the village! The prophesied hero has come!”

 

Zelda stared directly forward, deliberately blank-faced. She was not some hero of reptilian legend. Skytongue was a lunatic, and she wanted no part of it.

 

She very deliberately ignored a quiet, almost certainly imagined sniggering from the rusty blade at her side.

 

A stoic disposition was not good enough. Lizalfos swarmed Zelda, speaking all at once, all glad to see her. It didn't stop until some kind of leader shouted down the group and invited her to speak in her... she didn't call it a  _home_ , actually. She called it a shack. Zelda was pleasantly surprised by her honesty. Most would've downplayed the primitive state of the structure.

 

Zelda accepted the invitation with no small amount of relief, and directed the Doll to deal with the wagon. Once inside, the Lizalfos (Elder? Mayor? Chieftain?) began to explain the situation, still speaking as clearly as any Hylian of good breeding Zelda had ever met -indeed, better than most. Very strange.

 

Apparently this tribe of Lizalfos had, many generations ago, made a compact with a man made of stone (Zelda was skeptical, as the Gorons were well-known to live in the frozen north) to protect a shrine to the Goddesses within the mountain. They had held to that compact for ages, until quite recently strange, glittering invaders had driven them out to the foot of the mountain. Their head priest had consulted the stones and foretold that a hero would arrive, and then headed back in to the mountain, as it needed to be appeased or it would soon erupt. They hadn't heard from her since.

 

Zelda found it absurd that the Lizalfos hadn't simply followed the priest in to retrieve her -only it turned out that the staircase into the shrine had collapsed in an earthquake not long after she went in. The entrance was placed high up, the walls sheer aside from where the staircase had originally cut through.

 

Zelda didn't see how the Lizalfos thought  _she_  was supposed to get in, as their “prophesied hero”, but kept the thought to herself. She so often found other people incomprehensible, why should Lizalfos be any different?

 

At the earliest opportunity Zelda made her excuses to leave, hoping the Lizalfos had forgotten about her and would no longer mob her. She was half-right: many of the Lizalfos had apparently returned to their usual everyday work, but there was still a knot of Lizalfos ready to harass her the instant she stepped outside.

 

Fortunately, they moved to let her pass. They followed her, yes, but they didn't  _block_  her. When she thought to ask where the entrance to the “shrine” had once been, they were eager to give her directions. One Lizalfos child, in particular, rudely took her (thankfully still gloved) hand and began tugging her along, past a ring of guards and on through trees and rocks. She considered rebuking the child -a slap, maybe- but was distracted by the child announcing they were “here.”

 

It had clearly once been a staircase fit for a Goron to climb. That seemed odd. They rarely traveled this far south, and no other people she knew of would need the support. More importantly, the area was thick with Skullwalltula, the parts of the staircase that were missing replaced with extensive webbing. In practice this meant there was a large swath of webbing punctuated occasionally by a handful of steps, which usually did not even stretch all the way from one wall to another.

 

A colony of Skullwalltula at this kind of scale -there were dozens of the things- was not something Zelda could recall having read about, but there they skittered regardless. This was also rather further down the mountain than Zelda had been expecting an entrance to some kind of shrine within the volcano to be. There had been many temples and shrines in Death Mountain's storied history, but they'd traditionally been placed toward the  _top_  of the mountain. Puzzling.

 

Zelda double-checked with the stone around her neck, but found herself unsatisfied with its (lack of) precision, waveringly pointing more-or-less toward a random section of wall near the base of the staircase. So she brushed the child's grip away and knelt down, pulling chalk from her dress. The lines for the connective ritual came easily, and from there it took a little focus to 'grasp' anew at the connection she had found in the Temple of Time, the one she had followed here. The trace indeed threaded its way to some point past the crumbling archway that stood at the end of the ruined staircase, strong and energetic and feeling hot by some metric she couldn't articulate.

 

So. She would need to find some way past the Skullwalltula and the sticky trap of their enormous web... which 'setting the whole ablaze' was not a valid answer to, seeing as how the staircase was not navigable without the webs in its current condition.

 

Inconvenient.

 

She frowned, thinking, ignoring the sibilant hiss of the child -wait. A glance at the Lizalfos youth showed it was simply watching her curiously. The voice she heard-

 

her gaze swung to the colony

 

-the voice **s**  she heard were coming from  _the Skullwalltula._

 

Zelda took a deep, calming breath. There was surely an explanation. It was... not  _unheard_  of for tremendous energies to produce strange breeds. Speech, though atypical, was able to occur as one of these abnormalities.

 

The problem was the  _string_. Horse, Lizalfos, and now Skullwalltula -and that damnable coin was bothering her again. She pulled it out, but though her fingers tingled at the touch, she saw nothing new. It was not glowing, nor humming, nor otherwise obviously activated.

 

Experimentally, she said “Child. I would like for you to hold this for a time, but I expect it back.”

 

The child became excited, and then something sly exuded from it. Somehow she couldn't shake the impression of a mischievous, scheming grin, though the child's mouth did no such thing. It was slightly open, and that was that. It said in response “I want  _that_ -” pointing at the chalk she had not put away as yet “-after.”

 

Zelda mulled that over. Good chalk was not cheap, but she had plenty regardless, and did not use much at a time. She was  _efficient_ , unlike some practitioners she could name. Ultimately she agreed, primarily because the child had explicitly asked for the payment after. The trust extended deserved reward, and the savvy to understand Zelda would be reluctant to hand over both and let the urchin flee with them was commendable. With a nod, she said, “Very well,” and held out the medallion, green-scaled hand shooting out to envelope it.

 

Abruptly the world seemed... muted, somehow, as if she had walked into the Temple of Time on Market Day, going straight from a riot of human noise to a cloistered peace. It was disorienting, and it took a moment to regain her bearings and realize the Skullwalltula were now silent aside from the distinctive scraping sound they produced in motion. Even longer for her to realize the somewhat distant chatter of the Lizalfos camp had transmuted into a mockery of the oldest tongue. The hard consonants seemed to elude the Lizalfos, which was unfortunate as the language was rather fond of them, and would occasionally string together three back to back in an individual word. It pained Zelda to listen to their butchery of so noble a language. Even the little Lizalfos child's excited speech was a grotesque butchering, and it seemed to have a rather greater mastery of this tongue than its older brethren.

 

Haltingly, much more used to reading and occasionally writing in this language, Zelda asked the Lizalfos child what they heard. They cocked their head at her, like a bird, and from there an agonizing back and forth occurred in which Zelda learned exactly nothing of value. Finally she demanded the child hand the medallion over -well, strictly she asked that the child hand the “shiny” over- and  _also_  stick around long enough to answer some questions.

 

It went very still, and then asked to have a  _second_  piece of chalk as payment for the questions. Exasperated, Zelda agreed. The medallion was passed to her -tingling the instant it touched her, the world suddenly a riot of  _comprehensible_  words- and one piece of chalk passed back. She sagged a bit in relief. The Lizalfos camp's chatter had been torture to listen to in its natural state.

 

From there she interrogated the child -and with interest noted that her ability to read the child as if they had a Hylian face had returned- and determined that, no, they had not benefited from the coin's power. To the Lizalfos child, it was a green rock. In fact, the child claimed it was old, pitted with holes, and held no decorative marking at all. Just a circular rock, albeit a “pretty” shade of green.

 

_Interesting_.

 

Once satisfied with her interrogation -and sensing impatience from the child- she handed over a second piece of chalk. Delightfully, the child fled, leaving her alone but for the Skullwalltula. She most certainly did  _not_  sag with relief, and how dare the rude reader insinuate otherwise. She simply turned her attention to the Skullwalltula in a calm and focused manner, bringing the full force of her considerable intelligence to bear upon them.

 

There was a trick to their webs, she knew. Scholars hadn't figured out the details, but some of the forest folk were known to walk or climb on a web without getting caught, and it had been proven that a Skullwalltula  _wasn't_  simply immune to its own web through dangerous testing. Presumably they were more careful than they seemed about picking their way along their webs, the sticky parts only a small fraction of the webs.

 

Zelda tried watching the mass scuttle about, but even once she picked out a specific one to follow, she couldn't discern an obvious pattern in its movement. Frustrating.

 

Finally, with much trepidation and many misgivings, she decided to simply  _ask_  the nearest Skullwalltula.

 

“You there. How do you walk across these webs safely?” She didn't really expect an answer.

 

She got one anyway.

 

“Eh?” The nearest Skullwalltula spun in place to bring its eyes (Placed in the “mouth” of the skull, of course) to bear on Zelda. “Wait, you can  _talk_?”

 

The shock in the monster's voice left Zelda affronted. Of  _course_  she could talk. It was lesser creatures that lacked speech. Normally. Nonetheless, Zelda restricted herself to a simple, “Yes.” It was a heroic effort, worthy of ballads all by itself, to restrain herself from saying more, but she managed it with aplomb and grace.

 

“Oh.” The Skullwalltula sounded... disappointed? “I thought food didn't talk.”  _Excuse me?_  “I don't suppose you'd like to just walk into our web?”

 

Somewhat dryly Zelda noted, “You don't socialize much, do you?”

 

Somehow managing to sound  _defensive_ , the Skullwalltula insisted, “No no no, I have plenty of friends -well, family anyway- in the colony! We're all great friends here!”

 

From the distance, another voice called out, “Nobody likes you, Gap-tooth!” followed by a chorus of, “Yeah!”-s and, “What she said!”-s and other agreements.

 

Without 'Gap-Tooth' moving at all, Zelda somehow got the impression of someone wilting in dismay. She raised one eyebrow as her only commentary, not really expecting the motion to be noticed. Gap-Tooth nonetheless reacted as if stung, furiously insisting, “They just don't like me because I'm a better spinner than they'll ever be!”

 

There was a further raucous of abuse, amounting to, “Yes, and you never shut up about it.” Something resembling sympathy was aroused in Zelda's breast, an unfamiliar feeling of familiarity. She knew what it was like to be better than others, grind their face in it at every opportunity, and in turn find yourself belittled. The appropriate response was, of course, to tear apart their words, set them on fire if they turned to violence, and commiserate with your genius swordsman butler over the incompetency of the masses, but Zelda imagined that this 'Gap-Tooth' was not afforded such opportunities, what with being a skull-bodied spider restricted to this single web. Skullwalltula loathed leaving their established webs in adulthood, and there were cases of a Skullwalltula starving to death rather than seek a better location.

 

So she did a rather uncharacteristic thing.

 

She offered succor.

 

“I could help you re-locate if you like.”

 

'Gap-Tooth' was visibly delighted, radiating pleased shock. (The green coin was worth looking into when all this was done -Zelda was very impressed by its thoroughness now that she had an idea of what it did) This was brief-lived, as it became suspicious and asked, “What's the catch?”

 

This was more familiar ground for Zelda. In truth, she'd offered merely out of misplaced sympathy, but negotiation was easier, more sensible, and she  _did_  need to get across... and back. “I want inside the mountain, and safe passage back.”

 

Buoyant in response, Gap-Tooth said, “You drive a hard bargain foo- uh, sister. Done!”

 

Yes, Gap-Tooth was definitely an inexperienced rube. Regardless, this was good.

 

In the end they settled on a simple system -Zelda would ride atop the Skullwalltula's body. They could carry quite the load, and Gap-Tooth insisted the other Skullwalltula would not attack anything she was carrying. (“Because if we don't have honor, we don't have civilization, and if we're no better than animals, what's the point?” Zelda had limited herself to, “Quite.”) The process was awkward, but less awkward than Zelda had first imagined, and the other Skullwalltula, though they eyed the strange pair with distaste and hunger, did not interfere, and in one case even moved aside. (Zelda had the impression of a staring contest, though the two creatures' eyes never met that she could tell)

 

Zelda  _still_  couldn't figure out what the trick to the webbing was, but decided that, on balance, she didn't really care that much.

 

At the other side, she disembarked carefully into the archway, politely thanked Gap-Tooth (Who cheerily said “All part of the bargain!”), and made her way inside the volcanically active mountain.

 

\---------------------------------------------------------

 

It was hot. This was no surprise, but it bore commentary regardless. Parts of Zelda's outfit were sticking to her, soaked in sweat, her boots felt like they had tiny lakes in them that sloshed with every step she took, and she was regretting not bringing any water with her. Well. Not anything  _drinkable_.

 

There was light, Zelda wasn't  _entirely_  sure where it was coming from, but it was a dim red light suffusing the entire area, just barely enough to see outlines. The light-eating effect of the rusted wreck was all but invisible in these circumstances, yet probably-the-Master-Sword seemed to radiate a sense of  _comfortableness_  in the mostly-darkness. That ran contrary to Zelda's intuition, which felt that if the blade ate light it should logically be empowered by doing so. On the other hand, Zelda preferred to believe that these impressions of hers were simply her projecting onto a lifeless object, so she went back to ignoring it.

 

This desire ran into the problem that it was historical fact that the Blade of Evil's Bane  _chose_  its master, but Zelda soldiered stubbornly on with this probably-false belief. The alternatives were... distressing.

 

The inside of the mountain seemed an eerie place. Aside from a muted burbling, as if water was boiling somewhere nearby, the only sounds were those produced by Zelda's own movement.  _Something_  had driven the Lizalfos out of the mountain. Had it simply left at some point? Hm. It would've had to do so by a different path, though, to not be noticed by the Lizalfos camp. Perhaps it died, however? It bore thought.

 

After far, far too long walking, she turned a corner and found she saw what she felt certain was the outline of a doorway, along with the distant sounds of... something. Activity of some kind. She became more cautious in her approach, now very careful to make sure she did not kick away any rocks as she went forward, and also watching that she didn't bang the sword against a wall. (Which she had. Repeatedly. And not-at-all-intentionally-or-spitefully, how dare the reader suggest she was so petty or anthropomorphizing an admittedly magical sword!)

 

When at last she had arrived, she found herself looking down into a vast cavern. It caught her off guard, though more shocking was what occupied the floor of the enormous space.

 

A Moblin camp... sort of.

 

The pig-men were difficult to make out in detail at this distance, but they seemed off to Zelda. They were hulking brutes with faces only a mother could love, yes, but they held themselves with pride and wore  _armor_. The armor itself was elaborate, and strangely beautiful. Gilded, if her eyes did not deceive her, and shaped to soften the harsh lines of their bodies. On some of them, the armor seemed to suggest wings, without actually hindering their motion or adding much weight to carry. Their weapons were not the simple spears Moblins usually favored, either, being a mixture of bows, swords, and the occasional battleaxe. Many of them even carried shields, and most all of them wore helmets, albeit open-faced ones.

 

(Zelda could not imagine how they bore the heat within the mountain without being cooked by their own armor, but apparently they did. She could only assume the armor was spelled to protect them from the heat. Any other possibility did not bear thinking)

 

Also, they glittered.

 

Not their gear, oh no. Their tools were free of the sparkling white-blue lights, which was why the glitter had not caught her eye first thing -it was only their faces, legs, and occasional exposed arms that displayed this oddity. As artificial creations of the King of Evil, it was difficult to imagine why the brutes would cloak themselves in light. It was quite literally contrary to their nature as manifestations of a dark art, and yet here they were. Baffling.

 

It took so long for Zelda to observe the most obvious feature of the cavern that she might have died of shame were there any witnesses that mattered. This being that this cavern was better lit than the tunnels leading up to it because a massive pig-man sat in the center, quite literally radiant where the lesser pig-men had dull glimmers studding their skin. The glow rendered torches unnecessary. (Which was good for them, as there were many problems with torches burning in an enclosed space like this, even as large of one as this, even smokeless torches)

 

It took some squinting, but Zelda managed a closer inspection of this largest Moblin.

 

It was not a Moblin.

 

It was Ganon, King of Evil.

 

Though for some reason, instead of a spear -the stories were  _extremely_ consistent on that being his favored, indeed only weapon- he held a sword and shield, the tremendous blade currently resting across his knees. His skin color was impossible to determine through the golden glow, so she couldn't say whether he was blue or green or something else entirely. His overflowing mane of hair was tamed into a warrior's topknot, and was the correct color -red- if she wasn't mistaken, though with the glare it was difficult to be sure. He wore less armor than the strange Moblins -no helmet, for one- but still more than in traditional depictions, having protection for his arms, legs, the main of his chest... and she  _thought_  she saw chainmail going down the back of his neck, but this was a bad angle to be certain of such.

 

Zelda's first impulse was to retreat, retrieve the materials necessary for Phantoms, and unleash a mob of them on the camp. Her mind flashed to the mockery, how it had easily destroyed the Phantom, and she became doubtful it was a good plan. It would also complicate her deal with the Skullwalltula, and she couldn't count on it being willing to take her across more than they'd originally agreed.

 

No, she would not spend materials on a Phantom rush, not in these conditions.

 

On a hunch, she backed up to be completely out of sight,  _carefully_  cleared an area for her to use, and then brought out her chalk and checked for the connection she'd been following, still dissatisfied with the neck-stone's performance. (Truthfully, she was inclined to take it apart for raw materials at this point)

 

To her surprise, it did  _not_  point directly at Ganon. It pointed somewhere beyond the camp, still deeper inside the mountain. That... was a good thing, though a bit surprising. Though, on further thought, perhaps it  _wasn't_  surprising that a line to the Temple of Time did not trace directly to the King of Evil. Perhaps Ganon had generated the soulthief using... wherever the connection  _did_  terminate as the entry point? It was possible, and also possible he'd somehow leveraged the connection to the Temple of Time to transport the soulthief there without crossing the intervening terrain.

 

_Though... why bother?_

 

She frowned. She had to be missing something. Ganon, King of Evil, for some reason glowing golden, had driven out Lizalfos from Death Mountain instead of drafting them, and sat inside the mountain for... months? Years? He was free, and he had an army, and he  _wasn't_  trying to conquer Hyrule at this very moment? And she's hypothesizing that he somehow breached the Temple of Time's protections for an utterly trivial purpose to achieve an utterly trivial goal?

 

… and then there'd been the  _mockery_. It, too, had brought the sun with its very presence, and it wasn't actually  _her_. Eyes narrowing, Zelda contemplated Ganon, all the ways in which he was  _wrong_ , and so too was his army wrong. Perhaps this wasn't Ganon at all, but rather a twisted parody, made in almost his image yet not quite, for arcane reasons. Intimidation? But then why have him hide away in Death Mountain?...

 

Zelda rubbed at her forehead in frustration. If this  _wasn't_  Ganon at all, but some creation made in his image... why make something so recognizably Ganon-esque, and yet get all these details wrong? What was the  _point_? The King of Evil was well-known, so it seemed unlikely to be errors made in ignorance. Which meant it was... deliberate? Or some kind of limitation? Deliberate seemed unlikely. Limitation... she knew too little to say whether that was plausible or not.

 

Regardless, Ganon, or faux-Ganon, whatever, was somehow connected to the soulthief. It was, in fact, known that the King of Evil had stolen souls before, so it was plausible that he'd made the soulthief. Which meant Link's soul was probably somewhere in the area.

 

…  _wondrous_.

 

Stealth, mayhap? All she really cared about was retrieving Link's soul. She could report the force later, let the military handle it.

 

Yes, stealth. The safe, sensible route.

 

She set to work inscribing, using the carefully preserved blood of that rare breed of Floormaster, the kind your eyes make no note of. She stained her skin and clothes with designs whose core image was that of the Sheikah Eye -there was a reason the Shadow People had used the image extensively. She also pulled spare cloth from one of her many pockets and stuffed her boots, to muffle them. She'd still have to walk carefully -she could still be heard, felt, and even smelled- but so long as she wasn't  _foolish_ , she could be in and out in no time at all.

 

From there, she made her way down the long, winding path into the camp, briefly glad that she was not susceptible to vertigo. The path was smaller than she'd prefer. She winced each time she hit loose material and a minor cascade went down, but only a handful of the Moblins even seemed to notice, and they limited themselves to glancing curiously in her direction. They didn't seem to think it worthy of concern.

 

Possibly this had to do with the legion of Keese colonizing the ceiling, periodically shifting such that a rock was -no wait they were just defecating.

 

…

 

_Disgusting_.

 

The Moblins had made almost no effort to protect themselves from the rain of filth. They had make-shift shelters to sleep in, and appeared to have covered their supplies with tarps and similar, but the Moblins wandering about on business (?) seemed content. Or unaware. Zelda couldn't imagine  _how_  they could be so unruffled by walking through the filth, let alone passively accepting of being splattered...

 

She found herself longing again for the simplicity of simply burying the Moblins in Phantoms, rather than skulking through the filth they were buried in. In fact, wrinkling her nose, she found herself wondering if Link's services were  _really_  worth wandering through...  _this_. Not only was it  _utterly disgusting_ , but Keese and their byproducts were notoriously prone to lighting on fire and burning for a long time, to the point they were the basis of some forms of bomb fuse, among other uses. In fact, it was a minor miracle the camp wasn't a... raging...

 

… inferno...

 

…

 

_Hmmm._

 

Zelda backed away to her original perch, cursing herself for wasting the Floormaster blood. All she'd need for this was a spark, and once the fire had burned itself (and everyone in here) out, she could dig through the ashes for whatever contained Link's soul. If it was foolishly fragile, such that the fire destroyed it, then even better; Link's soul would escape and promptly seek out his body, and her journey would be done. Easy.

 

It took a minute to find where she was keeping her flint, but from there she pulled out an old, filthy rag (You never know when you might need to clean up after an experiment), wrapped it carefully around a rock, placed that near the entryway, and then struck the flint until the rag lit. From there, she kicked it -she so loved her Dodongo-hide boots- in an attempt to launch it toward the center of the camp. It fell far, far short of that, as she was not any kind of athlete, but that was fine. The Moblins collectively noticed it, but that too was fine. Ganon, or whatever he was, stood abruptly, but that was still fine.

 

The rock hit the ground. Flames rose. Something like an explosion occurred, spraying, er,  _material_  everywhere, itself on fire. Fires erupted where they landed, of course, some of which also burst to spread the flame further, faster. The Moblins squealed like... well, like stuck pigs. The Keese on the ceiling, inveterate lovers of fire -it protected them from predators or something, probably- began dropping from the ceiling in a  _wave_ , going from one end of the cavern to the other, loosely following the progression of flame. They dove into the fires, took swipes at the Moblins, and occasionally even mobbed one to death and began feeding.

 

The chaos was  _glorious_ , with the only less-than-thrilling point being that Ganon had roared furiously once and then simply begun rampaging directly toward her. He tromped heedlessly through the fire, casually shattered Moblins too slow to escape his charge with a crash of his shield, and  _bit individual Keese out of the air_  without breaking stride. It would have been a thrilling show in a tourney, aimed at some sap. Targeted at her, it was... concerning. Yes, let's go with that.  _Concerning._

 

Now, this is not to suggest Zelda panicked. She remained stoic in the face of danger, as befit her royal heritage. Countless girls in her lineage had unflinchingly faced down the King of Evil with little more than the clothes on their back, so she had of course inherited their propensity for courage. Or maybe she inherited her father's absent-mindedness. Or his mild pyromania. Whatever the case, she did not react to Ganon's charge initially by virtue of being absorbed in the glorious outcome of her one simple action.

 

It was only once he reached the edge of the camp, even his  _cape_ unsullied by the heat and smoke, crushing a Moblin's skull under one hoof, that she deigned to notice the King of Evil.

 

“Foul servant of the Goddesses!” he bellowed, furious.

 

Ah, yes. So it  _was_  Ganon. That was... potentially very bad, but the world made sense again. Roughly.

 

“He Who Glories In Generosity, he who set me on my path, the saint known as Rebirth says  _No! **You shall not destroy all that is good and pure with your corrupting touch!**_ I shall purge your filth in his name!” he carried on, religious fervor filling his voice.

 

… and now it didn't.


	3. Chapter 3: Battle Bright

 

 

Confused, Zelda could be forgiven for her slow reaction to Ganon's inhuman burst of strength -with a single mighty leap, he stood before her, somehow balancing on the thin path. He loomed well over twice the height of the entryway, distracting Zelda with wondering  _how_  he had gotten inside Death Mountain in the first place, and then with a roar he swung his massive sword at her.

 

There was a  _clang_ , and then Zelda's mind caught up with current events: the Master Sword had found its way into one hand somehow and from there twisted into a block. Bizarrely, the rusted hulk had taken Ganon's blade head-on and stopped it. She barely even felt the impact, which was mind-boggling.

 

Ganon's eyes -glowing golden, she noted distractedly- narrowed, and he kicked her easily. She launched backward with the crack of broken ribs, coughed up blood, and blacked out.

 

When she returned to her senses, it was to the sweet sound of Ganon cursing his own stupidity -he couldn't simply follow her into the tunnel, so massive was he. In kicking her like that, he had denied himself the ability to do worse to her.

 

_For the moment_  she amended once she'd somehow sat up. He was squeezing himself into the tunnel regardless, and though it was slow going, he  _was_  making progress. At least it seemed to be costing him -she could see rivulets of blood, obvious against his radiance, flowing down from where his shoulders scraped against the ceiling.

 

Fingers shaking, not entirely under her control, Zelda pulled a bottle of Red Potion out. Uncorking it was difficult, and the increasing urgency made it harder, not easier. She managed it regardless, gasping in pain the whole way. She jerked as she  _felt_  her ribs resettle -it was no Fairy healing, but Red Potion would blunt the worst of the damage and help her power through what pain remained for several minutes, but she'd never used it to treat so a serious injury. She wasn't entirely sure how well it would work.

 

Scrambling to her feet and backing away from Ganon, Master Sword somehow clinging to her dress in its unique way, she found herself wishing she'd kept more than one bottle of the stuff on hand. It was for  _lab accidents_ , though. Combat was for the help! She'd realistically never  _need_  more than the one bottle under normal circumstances.

 

Though upon further thought it probably was genuinely foolish of her to go exploring in the wilderness with only a single Red Potion. Especially since it was a soulthief that had got the ball rolling.

 

Ganon's shield, a thing of diamond shapes and jagged edges, slammed down just in front of her. If his reach were longer, or she'd been slower, she'd be missing a leg.  _Not something a Red Potion can undo_  she thought with a note of hysteria. On impulse she grabbed the Blade of Evil's Bane and stabbed at the shield. Metal on metal rang out, but not a mark was left on the shield. Ganon, meanwhile, continued to pull himself through the tunnel, leering at her and rumbling out how she would die in holy fire.

 

_No! Done! No more!_

 

Zelda turned and fled down the tunnel as fast as she could. It wasn't very fast at all, being more of a stumbling, staggering jog where she clutched at her tortured ribs and periodically slowed down to gasp for breath, but Ganon couldn't keep up with her in these conditions so it would be good enough...

 

… at least until he got to the end of the tunnel himself, following her out into the wider world. Which he seemed dead-set on doing.

 

Okay, so  _actually_  she needed to work out a way to deal with him pretty much right now.

 

She dragged a hand down her face, groaning half in agony. The other half was exasperation with the situation. She'd had a flash of inspiration, her brilliance  _should've_  left naught but scorched earth, and instead some bizarre version of the King of Evil had shrugged it all off. Even his  _cape_  appeared to be fireproof! Unfair. It didn't even appear to be Dodongo-hide, too silken for that, so he must've enchanted it. Or had someone do it for him. Yes, that seemed more plausible.

 

Much as it  _pained_  her to turn to such crass measures... she whirled to face the King of Evil, gripped the Blade of Evil's Bane, and lunged for one of his eyes. The plan was to catch him off guard, remove an eye, possibly kill him. (Probably not. This was Ganon, after all, or at least some strange imitation. He was  _rather difficult_  to kill)

 

In some sense, the plan was even a success. Ganon visibly startled, choked out “The  _princess_  with the blade?” and by all natural rights  _should_  have been struck mortally. But no, his shield flexed, its edges coruscating as if  _alive_ , and seemed to jerk itself in her way, Ganon's hand pulled haplessly along behind it. Her strike was, thus, blocked.

 

Because of course it was.

 

Oddly, the shield seemed to be soaking up Ganon's blood. Zelda was aware blood-fueled enchantments were possible, but they were usually placed on weapons or something more... controllable. Immediately following that observation, Ganon snarled, head jerking toward the shield, and bit out, “Now is  _not the time_.”

 

_A **recalcitrant**  artifact?_

 

That implied it was  _intelligent_. Capable of making decisions.

 

Capable of betrayal.

 

“Shield! If it is blood you desire, I shall ensure you feed greatly every day!”

 

Really, it was more a desperate gamble than a real plan, but-

 

Ganon's blank yellow eyes widened in what  _appeared_  to be some horror. “ _No._  You are  _better_  than that, Girahim. Restrai-”

 

That's when the shield rotated and, for lack of a less absurd term,  _bit_  Ganon on the nose. It was quite bizarre how articulate the thing was. Ganon howled, blood streaming from where his nose had sat a moment ago, and in his agitation dragged himself closer forward, heedless of how the tunnel tore at his flesh. The shield -Girahim?- somehow detached itself with such timing that it was flung toward Zelda's right arm. She noted it seemed to be folding itself down somehow, shrinking to fit her arm, and after a moment of hesitation she proffered her arm. The shield neatly caught itself on her arm. Zelda staggered, caught off guard by the abrupt weight. Unlike the blade in her left hand, the shield was  _not_  mysteriously light, and if anything seemed to be too heavy for its size and presumably-steel construction. Though the way it scintillated did not fit to even enchanted iron. She had no guess in mind, really.

 

Then Ganon stabbed again at Zelda, and she blocked with the sword -how that worked still baffled her- and, on impulse, swiped the bladed edge of the shield in an attempt to strike at Ganon's wrist. The shield unfolded for a moment into some serpentine form made entirely of sharp edges and  _twisted_ , the bloodspray vanishing virtually instantly as the snake-shield-thing swept through it. Ganon shrieked -yes, shrieked, it rather hurt his fearful image- and dropped his oversized blade, hand gone limp from the ravaging of his tendons and muscles.

 

Zelda stared at the mangled wrist, then at the shield, having already stepped back out of Ganon's reach. And a good thing she did, because Ganon simply grabbed the blade with his other hand, and then with a  _crack_  of some magic she didn't recognize he produced a blinding flash of light. Reflexively she ducked behind the shield -while doing her best to keep its rippling edges away from her face- and tried to blink her vision back into use. Then there was a sizzling, hissing sound burning its way toward her, and then she was bowled over by the force caught on her shield. Somehow she climbed to her feet without any cuts -”Thank you for your consideration, Girahim.”- in spite of still being blinded and clutching at two cutting implements she did not understand.

 

The sizzling repeated, Ganon growling angrily, and this time Zelda threw herself to one side. Whatever was making the sound shot past and, she presumed, impacted with the smell of a lightning strike following immediately after, vivid. The sizzle occurred  _again_  before she had fully climbed to her feet, and Zelda swung the blade blindly, shield still down near the ground from its weight. The spots in Zelda's vision were replaced with a moment of pitch black nothingness, and then abruptly she could see again, just in time to see the glare of a silver-yellow globe smack Ganon in one shoulder. He grunted, but seemed to shrug off the hideous burn it produced, already twitching the functioning hand in her direction. His sword's crossguard glowed a moment, and then the glow shot down the blade to finally leave the tip heading directly toward her.

 

Unsure  _why_ it had worked last time, Zelda swung the blade again, her ungainly flailing somehow becoming a graceful strike that any stickball player would be weeping with joy to witness. This ball of light struck Ganon directly in one eye, which exploded in a spray of gore Zelda flinched from, interposing her shield as protection from the disgusting mess. That the shield lapped this up appreciatively was a convenient coincidence. Unsettlingly, Ganon simply narrowed his other eye, either not in pain or ignoring it, and with a twist of her gut Zelda remembered some of the uglier stories of how Ganon had treated with prior members of her line. Hadn't he puppeted a corpse once, for no deeper reason than petty, spiteful hatred, the desecration of the body worth it on its own?

 

Then he flicked another one of those glowing balls of light at her, and instead of questioning her good fortune at his stupidity she prepared to send it back just like the prior two. She got a nasty surprise instead: with a triumphant sneer he snapped a finger and once again Zelda was blinded by an overwhelming amount of golden light, flinching from the glow. As such, she was completely unprepared when the ball struck her, skipping off the edge of her shield and then burning itself into her left shoulder.

 

The good lady was loathe to accurately recall this moment, later, but she shrieked and cried tears of bitter pain.

 

Now her sword arm was nigh-useless to her, and every motion of her body provoked a flinch from the agony caused by pulling on the burned skin, and she was still blind. This was, quite obviously,  _very bad_. So she turned and fled again, going entirely by sound to determine which direction was  _away_  from Ganon. Alas, he crowed, “Yes, your righteous punishment is coming! You cannot escape, monster!” and there was that  _hissing_  sound and though Zelda tried to move aside, she could not see and simply smacked into the tunnel wall, dazed for a moment before she was struck directly in her upper spine.

 

She collapsed like a puppet whose strings were cut.

 

“Yes! Justice is served, foul creature.” There was a scraping sound. “And don't think I've forgotten you, Girahim! You are done, dead, doomed, traitorous bloodthirsty liar. You've proven you cannot be decent or loyal for the final time. Make whatever last rites you have, beast.” The irony of that word did not escape Zelda in the slightest, for all that most of her mind was occupied by  **sheer blinding excruciating agony**. There was another scrape, a grunt, followed by a grinding noise as the actual beast drew closer. Zelda most assuredly did not whimper, cry, or regret her life choices. She stoically stood ready for the end -ignore that she wasn't standing at all- and was cool, calm, collected. She had a plan.

 

Honest.

 

There followed a strained, agonized squeal. Rather resentfully, Zelda took some consolation in the beast's own agony. At least in death she would have spited her foe in some meaningful way.

 

Or so was the general gist of her thoughts before the shield bit into her arm.

 

Dimly, she felt betrayed, and a little disappointed with herself for feeling betrayed. The thing had turned on its prior master readily enough. Why should she expect loyalty in turn? She found herself wishing she had the energy to do  _something_  to spite the thing back.

 

Then, as if her wish was granted, there flowed into her a feeling of well-being, starting from the bite and flowing up her arm, to her heart, and from there out to the rest of her body. Her back injury hurt less, became less tight. Her shoulder burn relaxed. Her vision lost its ugly spattering of blinding spots, dimming until she could actually see the cave, Ganon's alarmingly close visage included. Startled by being abruptly faced with his enormous frame, she jerked to her feet, wincing at how the shield bit deeper into her arm. Nonetheless, she managed a glance at the shield and said, “Much obliged, Girahim.” It was obvious, after all, that the shield had healed her.

 

Ganon himself was clearly startled as well, sword arm not remotely ready to take a swing. Then his face twisted into anger. “You hid abilities, too? Is there no end to your-”

 

He stopped because Zelda lunged forward and drove the sword directly through the empty eye socket. She was unsure why he didn't react, not even to jerk away, allowing her a clean strike right to his brain. Perhaps the missing eye had impaired him worse than she'd thought? In fact, on closer inspection his snout was large enough that his left eye shouldn't be able to see much of his right side.

 

Ganon slumped after an odd delay. The fall caused him to shed a layer of glittering dust Zelda hadn't previously noticed through the  _glow_ , and now she could see his skin was blue, as the glow was fading. Looking closer, it was rather  _familiar_  dust, like that which had been so heavily involved in the Temple incident. Curious, Zelda leaned down to grab at some as it fell -only for the glitter to die away so completely there was nothing left in her glove.

 

_Damnation_.

 

Was the material self-destructing, or did it lack ontological inertia? The distinction was important, and Zelda dug around for the bottle. She'd  _just_  drunk from it, she should still have it-

 

Her eye caught on a sliver of glass sticking out of one of Ganon's shoulders.  _Ah_. She'd never put it away. It must have been dropped during the chaos, and then crushed under Ganon's bulk as he dragged his hulking form in pursuit. She had no other bottles on her person. She'd have to get one from the wagon, which was entirely too far away. The glittery dust would fade entirely before she could head out and come back with a bottle to capture it in to see the result and study the stuff. Not worth the effort of trying.

 

She heaved a put-upon sigh, more bothered by the inability to satisfy her curiosity than by the fact that she'd nearly died.

 

Then her attention focused on Ganon, lips pursed in thought. Perhaps she should cut away some of his flesh for later study? The ancient texts weren't very clear what manner of being he was, when it came down to it, and the descriptions were either contradictory or painting a picture that didn't quite line up with any category she knew of.

 

This shift in focus was lucky, as it turned out. It meant that, even as lost in thought as she was, she saw the very moment Ganon's head shifted, most assuredly  _not_  in the manner of a corpse settling. The jaw widened as Zelda scrambled backward, appalled - _why is he not **dead**?!_ \- and there came a deep, unending groan of effort from within. That was a minor relief. He  _was_  flagging.

 

Then a hand, soaked red-black with crusted blood, shot out of the mouth and gripped the lower lip. It pulled, and with a groan a man's head came into view, also caked with blood. Zelda's jaw dropped, shocked. Ganon had  _eaten a man whole_? Why?  _How_? And why wasn't the man dead already?

 

The man dragged himself out of the corpse -which, oddly, seemed to be deflating, a silver-yellow steam rising from its blue skin. Zelda finally clicked her jaw shut, wanting to hide her shock and recollect her poise before the man was ready to look at her. She formed one of her many questions into words. “Who would you be?” Then, taking a closer look at the quality of what he wore, she tacked on, “Sir.” It seemed likely he was a noble, and though the respect was no longer necessary, she still found it useful to subtly remind nobles of their manners. After all, they might be noble, but she was  _royal_.

 

The man turned away, coughing a few times before transitioning to full-on vomiting, a nauseating mix of blood, stomach acid, and probably worse staining the stone. Zelda stepped back, her nose wrinkling. She studied the man closer, since he was clearly indisposed.

 

He had a long, large, slightly hooked nose. Zelda usually thought of such as a distinctly unattractive feature, but on the man it looked handsome. When the man wiped at his forehead, a brighter red remained, glinting in a way fresh blood did not. A gem of some kind? Hm. Either an indication of his birth or a tool to assist in bending the universe to his will. Perhaps both, now that she thought about it. His hands were quite large, his eyes, once he wiped the crust off of them, an odd yellow she didn't recognize... his ears were rounded. Not a Hylian, then.

 

The man lurched to his feet, leaning against the wall as he continued to violently cleanse his insides, and it became quite obvious that he was tall. Zelda was used to outstripping non-nobles and even some nobles in pure height, and this man had at least a head over her. He seemed surprisingly thin, though perhaps it was a perception fueled by his height, an illusion leading her to interpret a healthy weight as lacking. It also became obvious that his hair was, in fact, a vivid red, and not simply stained with blood -there was no fresh blood on him at all.

 

Underneath the filth caking the man's body, his skin glittered in a way that set Zelda's pulse pounding. She found herself drifting into a defensive stance, caught herself for a moment, and then consciously decided that no, that was correct, and resumed the stance. An enemy of Ganon was not necessarily an ally of Zelda, not even in the ancient records.

 

Ganon's corpse, speaking of, had melted gruesomely down to just a skeleton. Removed of all the obscuring flesh, it was strangely human, only the skull looking out of place, and more for the tusks than for any other reason. Zelda found herself disquieted, but noted the information in the privacy of her mind: Ganon's form did not sustain itself on its own, the bone excepted, and once whatever held it together was breached the form collapsed. Not a natural being, though this wasn't terribly surprising, given his history.

 

The man at last was reduced to heaving heavily, no longer ejecting the contents of his guts all over the cave.

 

Then he reared back and shouted something incomprehensible. This was immediately followed by a burst of blinding light - _damnation_ \- and the slap of flesh against flesh, her body abruptly coated in  _filth_. Zelda promptly vomited, finally overwhelmed by these events now that they had involved themselves quite intimately with her, and lost all sympathy for the wretch who had done this to her. Resentfully, she wished he was caged in Ganon's ribs once more, angry with the inconsiderate-

 

-her shield arm jerked and a violent strike rattled all the way up her arm. Alarmed, she backed away and swung blindly -quite literally- with her sword in the general direction the strike had come from, but the blade did not bite into anything. She was answered only with a joyous laugh, which abruptly ended in a grunt of irritation. She barely heard a shuffling noise, some dim instinct from her spars with Link telling her it was the sound of a foot shifting, and lunged directly at it with her sword thrust point-first and her shield held to protect her face. There was an aggravating cackle, circling to her left, and it took a moment for her to regain her balance. In that moment a strike clipped her shoulder, and she misstepped on some rock that went skittering away.

 

Surprisingly, the shield -Girahim- somehow arrested her landing relatively smoothly. She choked out, “My thanks,” and attempted to pull herself back to her feet. Instead, the sword slipped from her numb grasp, shoulder jerking violently instead of rotating smoothly.

 

_**Damnation**_.

 

The man ripped Girahim out of her grasp  _(painpainpainpain),_  punched her in the jaw so hard she was pretty sure it was dislocated -it hurt too much for her to be sure- and then laughed. Then there was the sound of violence being done upon steel. “Traitor! Filth! Bloodthirsty maniac!  _This_  is what you deserve! Suffer, die, and repent before being reborn.” A pause, seeming deliberate. Then the man -whose voice seemed strangely familiar- continued in a casual tone that was clearly faked. “Oh. I forgot. You're not a person, you don't have a soul. You're just going to go to oblivion once I'm done with you. How terrible of me. Oh well!” Metal shrieked, sounding almost like someone in agony. The man laughed.

 

Zelda realized, vaguely, that she was laying on the dirty floor. Her first impulse was to be offended. Her second was to be disgusted when it occurred to her she might be laying in filth worse than rock dust. Then she pulled together and thought  _this man is aligned with Ganon_  which made approximately  **zero sense**  but was self-evidently true regardless. She must have misunderstood something, or missed something. She couldn't imagine what, honestly, but it must be so.

 

Slowly, carefully, she moved to poke at her jaw with one finger. There was blinding agony, and also it moved in a way a jaw should never, ever move.  _Broken, in addition to dislocated_.

 

That would make drinking a red potion problematic.

 

Assuming she made it out of this confrontation alive, which was seeming rather unlikely at the moment.

 

“And  _you_.” The man's voice dripped contempt and sounded like he was facing her way.

 

_No not yet I'm not ready I don't have a pl-_

 

She was hauled to her feet without ceremony or grace. There was a noise, and something new and disgusting on her face. It took a moment for her to realize the man had  _spat on her_.

 

“Always serving those  _damned_  Goddesses, always hurting my people. I don't know how you keep subverting the cycle of reincarnation, you evil little  _wench_ , but this time,  _this_  time I have the backing of someone who knows how to trap souls.” The tone was pure gloating triumph. The words didn't make much sense, except for the part where it seemed extremely likely this man was connected to the soulthief.

 

He shook her. “Speak, damn you! You get a chance to repent, though you don't deserve it in the slightest. Rebirth would wish it so.”

 

Calm washed over Zelda.  _Here it is, my opportunity_.

 

She pointed, tremblingly, at her jaw. Probably. She was still blinded, yellow lights dancing around in the darkness of her eyes.

 

The man swore violently, going by his tone, though Zelda did not recognize the words.  _A foreigner of some kind._  Nonetheless, after a moment there was a feeling of warmth, and a bizarrely painless feeling of her jaw knitting itself back together, ever so slowly. Then it stopped, and the pain re-surged, the jaw not fully healed. Nonetheless, Zelda muttered in rapid succession  _One, two, three, four_  in the oldest tongue, and though her tongue felt overly large and awkward and her jaw pained her, she understood her own words with only a modest slur.

 

She'd dimly hoped the blindness would go away as well, but no. Even so. “Wha-  _what_  would be involved in this... repenting?”

 

She felt the scowl in his voice. “Do not lie and pretend you do not know. Everyone knows.”

 

Terror shot through her, but somehow she kept her voice calm. “Humor me, sir.”

 

There was a long moment where she thought perhaps the  _sir_  had been a mistake, would provoke him rather than convey submission and cooperation and respect.

 

Then the moment ended, though his voice was harsher than ever.

 

“You apologize to Rebirth, earnestly and honestly -and all will  _know_  whether you lie or not- and then you execute yourself with honor. Your soul thus cleansed will move on to the next body in peace. If you do it well enough, you may even be granted a boon in the next life, proof that Rebirth favors your soul evident on your body.”

 

She latched onto  _execute yourself with honor_. Well. That meant she couldn't lie, leave, and come back later to kill the man.

 

On the other hand, it meant she needed a weapon to go through his barbaric ritual, and there were only two in the area that she'd seen.

 

“Okay,” she choked out, ragged and tired. “Is there any specific formula to the apology I m-must follow?”

 

There was another long silence, in which Zelda imagined the man studying her face for deception. He would find none. The question was honest, and anyway nobody had ever caught her in a lie who was not Link or his damned horse.

 

“No.”  _Good_. “So long as you are honest and true and  _repent_ , it is acceptable. But you must repent for everything! Not merely for the single, smallest thing you have done.”

 

Given Zelda had done little that could be construed as worthy of apology, this struck her as a needlessly mistrustful qualifier. Then again, Zelda had long since become suspicious that he was under the impression she was someone else, someone he had a personal vendetta toward, so she let the slight against her pass.

 

Instead, she attempted to pull away, frowned when he did not lessen his grip on her injured arm -the cad- and clipped out, “I would like to kneel for this.”

 

She didn't, not really, but it was the position for prayer, and that seemed the most appropriate way to do this ridiculous ritual in a convincingly satisfying manner. It also, more importantly, meant the man would be forced to release her.

 

There was another long moment. Zelda attempted to keep her face serene. She may even have succeeded, though the pain tortured her and the situation galled her, and  _her butler was not worthy of these efforts_ \- but in any event, the man let her go. She promptly dropped in a graceless heap, before painstakingly pulling herself into a kneeling position. It took rather more effort to force her hands to clasp together in front of her, tortured shoulder shrieking in agony the whole way, and lowering her face so her hands were just barely touching her forehead proved to be the hardest step yet. She managed, though, ignoring the sounds of impatience the man was producing. (And hoping the very dim scrape of metal against stone she could hear from where she'd last heard Girahim were not audible to her foe)

 

She took a moment to order her thoughts and decide on an essentially honest summary that could be construed as an apology for prior misdeeds. Then, she spoke.

 

“I apologize to all those beings who may have suffered unnecessarily as a result of my studies. If I could learn without others being pained by it, I would do so-”  _if only because human volunteers would be an option_  “-but I cannot. At the same time, I have perhaps been callous to this suffering, unnecessarily so, and in retrospect it seems obvious I could have done differently.”  _Which is not the same thing as saying I_ ** _should_** _have done differently, nor **would now**  do differently._ She clapped her hands together, wincing in pain and then wincing at how the wince pulled on her jaw. “Amen.”

 

Another silence ensued, in which the man muttered to himself in some barbarian tongue. He sounded incredulous, which Zelda took to mean she'd done the ritual such that he could not find fault with it. She only succeeded in keeping the smirk off her face because smirking hurt more than keeping her face smooth and blank.

 

Finally, the man made a rude noise, and grudgingly bit out, “Acceptable.” This was followed by more muttering in that foreign tongue.

 

Then he jerked her up, and her heart juddered because, “Now you die-”

 

She blurted out, “You said I must execute myself!” because  _the plan centered on that she needed a weapon had he changed his mind?_

 

There was another long silence. Zelda noticed she could vaguely make out shapes in the darkness, now. Probably. “It's optional, and few have the bravery or nerve to go through with it. The handful that choose it almost never succeed in the act.” He seemed sullen.

 

Zelda raised an eyebrow imperiously, attempting to look him in the face as she did so. She likely failed, but that was beside the point. She rendered her voice as a cold, iron-willed woman. “You doubt my word?” There was an edge of hysteria to her tone, but that too was okay. It fit to the air she was attempting to project, of someone who could care about honor and words of all things when their life was on the line.

 

There was silence. “Well, no, not after tha-”

 

She cut him off. “Then fetch me my sword, cretin.”

 

The grip on her arm tightened until it hurt it hurtithurt _ithurt_

 

and then the pressure was gone, the hand with it. This time, though she staggered, she did not collapse. She kept the appearance of imperious offense on her face as best she could. It seemed to fit his expectations, and if he was thinking she was whoever he thought she was, he wouldn't be looking too closely at what she was actually doing.

 

To her surprise, the sword was thrust into her hand (The left one, so the one whose shoulder was in agony.  _Naturally_ ) with no further words from the man. Zelda hid her surprise as best as she could, nodding vaguely in the direction of the man. She kept it to the small incline she would reserve for a lowly servant - **much** more lowly than Link- having completed a task she had every right to expect them to cleave to. She heard leather creak, and guessed he was clenching a fist. Or two fists.

 

Nonetheless, she took a deep breath, as if in preparation of a supremely difficult task, and maneuvered the blade's rusted, roughened edge so that it was positioned to cut through her throat, left hand on the grip while the tip of the blade rested flat on her right hand, held palm-up.

 

The man made an impatient grunt, to her left.

 

Girahim scraped against the stone and its own metal, ahead and to her right.

 

She abruptly swung the sword out in a throw toward the man at the same time as hurling herself toward the shield. Her left shoulder spasmed, yet the outraged -and  _pained_ \- shout of alarm told her that she'd struck true somehow. The roll toward her shield was ungainly, awkward, horrible, and covered her in still more filth, but metal bit into her right hand and serpentined its way up her arm to coil halfway between her wrist and her elbow as she pulled herself to her feet, twisting to face the horrid man who had abused her so.

 

Her vision was, indeed, returning, well enough now that she could see the man's attempt to pull the sword out of his thigh. She tried not to think too hard as to how the rusted thing had bit so deeply into his flesh, right through leather and muscle, and focused on how his hand jerked from the sword with an agonized grunt. She wasn't sure, amid all the filth and shadows, but she believed she saw fresh blood dotting his palm. Regardless, he snarled, chopped his hand down in a knife-palm strike as she staggered toward him, and struck the blade such that it slid down and out, cutting through more thigh but exiting the wound.

 

The man dropped to one knee, left leg giving out on him. The bewilderment that took over his face was clear, obvious,  _satisfying_ , though also puzzling, but a puzzle for later. Zelda rushed him as best she could, shield-forward, and muttered to the back of the shield, “Make him bleed.”

 

Her momentum was disappointing. She smacked against his chest, and the only reason she didn't bounce right off him was because Girahim  _bit_  into his flesh. She sucked in a breath from the pain of being held in place by blades in her arm, but took the opportunity to try to lash at the man with her left foot, even as he slowly tilted backward.

 

He caught her foot with his uninjured hand. There was a sense of overwhelming pressure for perhaps a moment, and then bones audibly broke. Her vision went entirely white, but somehow there was no pain. That was worrying. Either the injury was nothing, or more likely it was so overwhelming she should be unable to think of anything except the agony. Since she had  _heard_  the bone break...

 

She collapsed, falling forward and to her right, half because that was how her weight was distributed and half out of intent. The position was awkward in the extreme, but she heard Girahim's blades shifting,  _felt_  them, and there was a disturbing wet sound she was trying to not focus on overly much. The man  _screamed_ , his uninjured hand twisting to try to hit the shield, but the position was wrong, and though she was as nothing in weight when compared to the man, she was still heavy enough to ruin the force behind the blow. Instead his hand was bit into by a dozen triangles of steel, which through some disturbing motion proceeded to pull the hand into the shield.

 

Beyond that point, there was little of import. The man screamed, bucked, and ineffectually flailed, trying to harm Zelda and break free from Girahim, and failed at every step to accomplish anything significant. After the first minute, Zelda closed her eyes to the gruesome death she was participating in, wishing she could close her all-too-sensitive ears just as readily.

 

Finally, there was silence, punctuated by a metallic sound  _entirely_ too reminiscent of a burp.

 

Zelda opened her eyes, barely flecked with tiny lights.

 

The man was quite obviously dead, flesh stripped from his skull and ribcage hollowed out as if something had feasted inside and then burst forth violently. His left hand was also missing up to the wrist.

 

Zelda looked away, nauseous, and focused instead on her new... tool? Companion?... Girahim, the shield. It shone with a luster as if it had been subjected to hours of careful, loving cleaning, and the fact that it was made of hundreds -no, thousands, no  _far too many_ \- scales was almost invisible, how neatly they fit together. Zelda's jaw worked for a moment, and even she was unsure whether she was going to empty her stomach or say something. She settled, at last, for, “My thanks, Girahim.” She added a nod, deeper than anything she'd given the now-dead man before her.

 

The shield's surface sussurated for a moment, a ripple of green-silver scales rising for a moment before dropping back down flowing from one end to the other. Zelda decided to take that as acknowledgment.

 

A  _clang_  interrupted them, her head jerking to face -the sword. It had apparently fallen, its tip previously only barely held up by a rock. Some part of her noted that it only made sense that it would not have remained balanced so long. Another part of her noted it as the latest in a string of plausible-yet-meaningful events.

 

She moved to stand, and then collapsed in a shriek of agony when she put weight on her left foot.

 

There was a moment where she was certain she'd have to somehow make her way back to her wagon -or dig through the torched Moblin camp- so she could acquire a Red Potion, where she  _most certainly did not approach tears_ , and do not insinuate otherwise!

 

Fortunately, this distressing scenario was avoided -Girahim rippled again, and that curious sense of well-being flowed out from where it was attached to her arm. Her vision cleared, her agonized shoulder knitted, her foot reset itself...

 

… and, she noted, the shield was rather smaller than it had been a moment ago. Perhaps a shade duller.

 

She blinked, staring at it. Cautiously, she reached out with her other hand, and touched it. When nothing bad happened, she patted it slowly, as she had seen Link do with dogs. Then, just in case offense might be taken, she clarified: “I would bow in thanks if it were possible to do. You have my gratitude, and you will have the blood you need.”

 

Nothing happened.

 

She waited a moment longer, and then lurched to her feet -thankful her boots had been flexible enough to survive the forces her bones had not- and made her way toward the sword. She stared at it for a moment, unsure how to handle this, and finally heaved a sigh and made a stiff bow toward the object, arms clasped against her sides. She did not dignify the blasted thing with words, however. Instead, she picked it up and examined it closely -somehow, though it was rusted, pitted, and scarred, it had no blood at all on it.

 

Her eyes darted to Girahim, wondering if the Blade of Evil's Bane was also a devourer of human flesh, and then she put the thought out of her head.

 

Zelda was sore tempted to turn around and leave. Her butler was seriously, truly, honestly,  _not worth this_.

 

… on the other hand, Ganon had seemed to both recognize her and have some form of grudge. And it seemed unlikely his force was an isolated one. Zelda had the uneasy realization that if she returned to her tower and made do without Link, she would likely be attacked at some later point, probably by a rather more competent assassin than the soulthief. Or by a force much less subtle than an assassin, and not so readily disposed of.

 

_It would also be tremendously disappointing to have gone through all **this** , and  **still not have my butler**_.

 

But mostly?

 

There was no way she could back out now and expect to be safe.

 

So, with a beleaguered sigh she 'attached' the sword to her hip -however  _that_ worked, she really should try to study it at some point- and made her way back to the Moblin camp, to investigate the remains.


	4. Chapter 4: Ashes

As it happened, the only dangers of note when Zelda arrived at the point overlooking the Moblin camp were the Keese and the still-raging fire. A glance up showed that the smoke wasn't collecting in the ceiling, so suffocation was unlikely to be a concern. Probably.

 

The camp itself was a disaster. Zelda smiled, pleased at how a little bit of effort had paid so richly.

 

Unfortunately, it reeked of cooking flesh and, to put it delicately,  _manure_. Also, everything was still on fire. Especially the Keese, which flapped about in the 'sky', seeming unsettled but not actively making dives. Zelda's inference was that the Moblins were all dead, or perhaps that some of them had escaped in the chaos and not returned.  _Or_ , she supposed,  _it's possible some of them are still alive, hidden in some bolthole beneath the flames_.

 

Unlikely, but possible. She would have to proceed with caution, even if the Keese proved non-hostile now that the initial violence had passed.

 

Zelda's lips pursed in thought. She didn't want to wait for the fires to die down to embers, but she wasn't sure she had a choice. Truthfully, she wasn't sure she'd have the nerve to return if she went back to her wagon.

 

A compromise occurred: though she was (mostly) healed of her injuries, she was not  _rested_. The doll and the wagon would not unduly suffer for her being absent a few hours longer, either.

 

Zelda muttered under her breath, possibly for Girahim's benefit, possibly for the Blade's benefit. Possibly for no one at all.

 

“I shall rest, I think, for some hours, and return to this situation once I am clear-headed. It is my hope that the camp will have ceased to burn, and I will be able to study it, find clues or even the thing I am searching for.”

 

There was no acknowledgment. Zelda's lips pursed again, this time in some annoyance, but then she let the topic go, backing deeper into the tunnel until she was reasonably confident no Keese could see her without actually entering the tunnel.

 

From there, she shucked the outermost layer of her clothes (Complicated somewhat by the need to talk Girahim into either detaching from her arm or compressing itself to make this possible -it chose the latter), rummaged through the pockets briefly, and then once she had determined no dangers lurked in the coat, arranged for them to act as bedding to lay upon, a pillow particularly.

 

It was vile, but it would do.

 

\-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Zelda awoke as if crawling through tar: slowly, frustratingly, and with the sense she was coated in filth.

 

Once she was awake enough to recollect herself, this comparison made a depressing amount of sense. Her nose wrinkled at the smell of ash, blood, and still worse things. Nonetheless, she felt... not precisely  _well_ , but considerably less poor than she had before she had bedded down.

 

She was sore tempted to abandon the impromptu bedding, coated in blood and ash and who-knows-what as it was, but ultimately decided against it. The coat was good quality, the best leather she'd ever had for her studies, and even if she proved able to replace it the cost would be tremendous. Tokay leather workers were difficult to contact at the best of times, and obstinate negotiators. It made more sense to hope it was salvageable in its current condition, however much it offended her senses.

 

She wished it made sense to abandon the filthy thing, to be sure... and hesitated for a long, long minute before actually pulling it on. (Taking a moment, once more, to talk Girahim into making this possible)

 

That miserable business handled, Zelda made her way to the overlook - _cautiously_ , it must be said. The gore staining her coat made truly gruesome noises as she moved, but she felt certain the sound was not traveling much further than her own ears, and did her best to put it out of her mind. Once she arrived at the overlook...

 

… well, there were still scattered fires burning insistently, and there were dots of flame flitting about in the darkness that must be Keese, but far,  _far_  less than there were before she had bedded down. She would need to be careful, and quiet, and if assailed by any Keese it would be critical to take them out such that no further attention was drawn to her. It wouldn't do to survive the King of Evil and then be slain by cave vermin.

 

She double-checked the sword -still somehow hanging from nothing at all at her hip- and, though it was honestly unnecessary, the shield as well. A sheen washed over Girahim's surface. Zelda found herself doubting it was caused by the movement of the flames, but couldn't find it in herself to care at the moment.

 

She descended the meandering slope, gaze flicking from where she was stepping to the 'sky' above, as well as to behind her. No Keese noticed her on the way down, however, and the walk itself was smooth enough in spite of the uneasy footing. Much more difficult was not retching at the stench she was descending into, a foul mix of bacon-by-way-of-cannibalism and burning bodily wastes and other less offensive but still overly  _present_  smells. It became so bad she stopped and retrieved a handkerchief from one of her many pockets to cover her nose, tying it around the back of her head to free her hands up. It helped less than she'd have liked, but she no longer feared she might faint, so good enough.

 

She hesitated once she reached the bottom of the slope. The ashes on the ground were dense, extensive, and  _deep_. Visions of stepping on a still-burning-hot lump of fat, unseen beneath the ash, danced through her head. She wasn't sure her boots would protect her feet in that scenario. Worse... she was quite certain she was hearing voices in the distance now. Was there a secondary camp, safe from the blaze? Her conviction that  _this_  was the primary camp was iron thanks to Ganon's presence, but it honestly hadn't occurred to her that there might be other camps in the area. Possibly other creatures had also had the idea of waiting for the blaze to die down before making their own investigation. (In more banal terms: looting)

 

That meant she had to hurry. She stifled an unlady-like curse and pushed on, not  _quite_  willing to use the Blade of Evil's Bane as a blind woman's stick. However tempting the thought was. Blasted thing.

 

It was more difficult than she'd have liked to determine whether a given mass rising out of the ash was the remains of what passed for buildings in this miserable hovel or a stalagmite, and Zelda found herself leaning rather more heavily than she'd have preferred on investigating glinting lights. It felt a little too much like being a Guay for her taste.

 

Her findings, in the end, were fairly disappointing. She was surprised anew by how much of the Moblin gear had been sophisticated, quality forging, instead of the crude wood and leather constructions normally attributed to them, but had yet to find any kind of safe box or the remnants of a containment/concealment work. If Link's soul was stored here, there were two major possibilities: whoever had stolen it (Ganon?) had been so sloppy that the container had been ruined, allowing the soul to escape, and Link was now awake back at the ranch of... that girl... in which case the primary goal of this journey was over and done with...

 

…. or Link's soul wasn't in the camp at all.

 

Though this business with  _grudges_  was sufficiently troubling she was already starting to think of the retrieval of Link's soul as a secondary goal, really.

 

With that search done, Zelda returned to the topic of the connection to the Temple of Time. It took little time to confirm that the connection went somewhere  _past_  the camp, deeper in the mountain. Ganon had been entirely incidental. A complete waste of blood, sweat, and fears! The  _outrage_.

 

A wry smirk crossed Zelda's lips when it occurred to her that she was dismissing defeating the King of Evil as a waste of time.  _I wonder if it would sting his pride to be seen so?_

 

Then she rendered herself serious once more. What could  _possibly_  be in a  _volcano_  with a connection to the Temple of Time's entryway to the Sacred Realm? A chill ran down her spine:  _is there a dragon nesting here?_  She had not heard of a dragon being sighted anywhere in the realm of Hyrule in three hundred years, but if the texts were to be believed that meant nothing. For being flying, fire-breathing lizards of tremendous scale, they were strangely competent at staying out of Hylian awareness until one quite abruptly was a very prominent problem. Supposedly the Hero of Time had fought a dragon nesting in a volcano, and it was popularly assumed that volcanoes were their natural grounds, which would be rather consistent with Hylians being ignorant of a given dragon's existence seeing as how people did not, as a rule, live in or venture inside such hostile locations.

 

Zelda was not prepared to fight a dragon.

 

… on the other hand, she couldn't imagine a reason for a dragon to have such a connection. Paranoia does not become a lady, and fear bred of it is not worth feeding.

 

Back to the task at hand.

 

Zelda trudged her way through the ash and scorched wood as well as around open flames plus the occasional relatively intact Moblin body. Most of the corpses had been ravaged by Keese while she slept, but some of them were in relatively good condition. Zelda's guess was that the Keese had run out of stomach space before they ran out of bodies to feast on, but it  _had_  crossed her mind there might be a more sinister reason. Maybe some of the Moblins were festering with some hideous disease Zelda would catch if she came too close, and the Keese somehow sensed it, or something of that sort. As such, she resisted the temptation to take a closer look at those corpses -or, more precisely, their intact equipment- and kept her distance, skirting these suspiciously-intact bodies.

 

She was still hearing distant voices as she walked, and it was becoming quite distracting. She couldn't quite pin down  _where_  they were coming from -it  _sounded_  like they were coming from above but there was nothing  _there_  but Keese- and the sense that there must be people somewhere nearby while in a hostile environment was a horrid scraping against her entire skin. Coupled with the stench and the effort involving in dragging herself through the ruins of the camp, she was quite stressed by the time she spotted a tunnel entrance that seemed likely to lead to her destination.

 

Miracle of miracles, nothing interrupted her, and the tunnel entry was clearly not a part of the camp proper, as the mounds of ash faded away twenty paces out. It was only now that she was relieved of the burden that Zelda appreciated how strenuous pushing herself through the ash had been, and she made a mental note to avoid walking directly through this mess if she returned this way.

 

A winding, somewhat dimly lit tunnel ensued, darker than Zelda would have preferred, but still visible enough thanks to a dull red glow whose source she couldn't pin down. The walls themselves? It  _looked_  more hot than it  _felt_ , which was a good thing to be sure. More worryingly, she noted footprints marked out in soot, and here and there were pieces of scorched cloth abandoned, sometimes wood. Some of the inhabitants of the camp, having escaped the blaze?  _Drat_. Had perhaps her butler's soul been in the camp after all, but they'd made off with it?

 

She stepped more carefully after noting that, trying to deaden the sound of her feet.

 

After not  _too_  many minutes, the tunnel widened, and brightened. Zelda hesitated, as the difference was enough to feel almost blinding if she looked directly at it, but she worried she'd wasted too much time as was. With a silent sigh, she decided to wait for her eyes to adjust...

 

… and as they did, she began to realize there was a  _clearly artificial_  mass of stone, rectangular shapes assembled into some kind of building. It was flush against the walls on both sides, and... seemed to meet the ceiling, as well. Carvings depicting... fire? The sun? Ambiguous. Stylized imagery of?... how very strange. They seemed to be depicting  _Gorons_. Zelda supposed the temple  _looked_  old enough for that to fit, inasmuch as the older writings insisted Gorons lived on or in Death Mountain...

 

She approached, quietly and hesitantly. If any of Ganon's creatures had escaped this way, they seemed likely to be trapped. It was  _possible_  there was a path out the other end, but Zelda had the suspicion there wasn't. This had been a place of worship, if she was reading the weathered writings correctly, worship of... heat? The sun? Unclear. Most likely it had been an end in itself, where a fort might have been placed here to control a chokepoint. In fact... if she was reading some of this correctly, it was inside Death Mountain to be as close as possible to “the blood of Hyrule.”

 

She checked the flows once more -yes, the connection to the Temple of Time went  _here_. Inside this structure. Hm. More evidence it was an end in itself rather than controlling a path or some such.

 

Alright. She had few resources on her, not much more than an unruly sword and a mysterious shield, and there was much risk to leaving for her supplies. But was that risk higher than progressing into the unknown? Zelda's gut said  _yes_ , even though her mind insisted that was a ridiculous assertion.

 

Contrariwise to her perception of her self, Zelda went with her gut in this case, and advanced upon the temple -though  _carefully_.

 

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Inside was a place in significant disrepair, studded with statues of unclear purpose. They were so far gone she wasn't even sure what species they were meant to represent. She  _suspected_  Lizalfos, but all she could truly say for sure was that they were bipedal and had two arms and one head. It seemed unlikely the Lizalfos camp outside the volcano had made these -or more precisely that their  _ancestors_  had made these- given that if they'd had such skill with stoneworking she'd have expected a more impressive camp, but that didn't obviate the possibility of having once hired (Perhaps enslaved?) artisans to produce work in their likeness.

 

The carvings were difficult to make out in the comparative gloom, but they seemed to repeat similar themes to the ones outside the building. Zelda spent little time studying them, however, as she found her first body not far deep into the temple, in some central crossroads.

 

A Moblin, marked seemingly randomly with severe burns. Odd. The burns did not look like they'd been acquired while fleeing the firestorm she'd set off. They were focused patches placed fairly randomly, where she would expect burns that had occurred while fleeing to be placed more toward extremities or relatively evenly covering large swathes of the body if, say, the Moblin had fallen into a fire and then managed to drag itself off here before expiring.

 

The shield -Girahim- bristled for a moment, stinging her arm with tiny bites. Absently, Zelda assured it, “Yes, you may feed, if you feel stale blood is acceptable.” Then she approached, lowering the shield arm to the corpse, her attention already elsewhere. She saw no weapon in the area. Had the Moblin's own been taken from it? By who, and why, then? For that matter, had it been taken from its corpse or from hands whose heart still beat?

 

And of course, since it didn't seem to have fallen to her blaze, what  _had_  killed it with fire?

 

Girahim produced an odd  _snapping_  sound, and Zelda glanced over. Was it done? She couldn't tell. It didn't seem to object when she stood back up, anyway.

 

Alright. There were three passages from here. The trail of ash continued to the right, gaining blood and torn cloth to color it, which was good as the ash itself was fairly intermittent at this point. There were scorch marks here and there in the passage beyond, as if something had been harrying the Moblin(s) with small fireballs. Zelda's first instinct was that their pursuer had been toying with them, but she was unsure why, and so ignored the thought for the moment. The passage  _ahead_ , though the lighting was not good enough for her to make out details at this distance, seemed to open into a very large chamber, lit from below. Worrisome. A glance to the left- ah. That passage ended in collapsed rocks. Unsurprising, if the place had not been taken care of in as long as it seemed.

 

So then her options were twofold. Follow, and hope the escapees were carrying Link's soul on them, and also hope she was a match for Moblins who seemed well-armed, armored, and very probably, going by what she'd seen of the camp, well- _trained_ , when they were already probably two or three times her mass... or go for no particular reason into the mysterious chamber of no relevance to her goals.

 

… actually, a check of the flows of energy showed the connection went to the chamber ahead. Hm. Perhaps she could find the soulthief's master through there, then, which would make this arguably the more urgent and useful place to investigate.

 

So she did.

 

The chamber itself proved to be  _open to magma_. Zelda gaped at the lunacy- oh. Earth's blood. Warmth, heat. A temple to fire from within the world. Lunacy, but a familiar sort of lunacy.  _Religious_  lunacy. Never mind then. Squinting, Zelda thought she could spy wardings banding the stone above the magma, keeping the heat down to 'distinctly uncomfortable' rather than 'spontaneous Hylian combustion.' Still utterly insane, but the kind of insane the truly dedicated pursued, rather than the kind those who were simply unhinged pursued.

 

She walked deeper into this chamber, keeping well away from the edges of the platforms. And would it have killed these people to have some guard rails? Nonetheless... she edged around the central pit of magma, making her way to a massive golden door, beyond which the energies flowed to-

 

-and then a Lizalfos, resplendent in golden robes and clutching a staff of bronze, appeared in a burst of fire and golden light directly above the central magma pit.

 

“ _Violator! Blasphemer!_ ” it screeched, sounding much like the Lizalfos outside, arms flailing so wildly glittering dust flew away from its sleeves. (How was the thing not  _dying_  in those robes? Zelda was far too hot, and she wasn't hovering over magma!) Then it rotated its staff three times, and with a jerk a fireball flew from the tip, angling down toward her. A small one, consistent with the scorch marks she'd seen in the other passage.

 

Zelda threw herself to one side - _away_  from the magma pit, thank you very much- and... realized her options were throwing the Blade of Evil's Bane at the floating creature, throwing Girahim the shield at it, or flee-

 

A stone door sealed the entrance shut, slamming down from the ceiling as the Lizalfos gestured downward in its direction.

 

-ing.

 

Drat and damnation.

 

“I don't suppose, Girahim, that you have been withholding the capacity for missile assault from me.”

 

The shield was damningly silent.

 

“Of course not,” she muttered. “Nothing so convenient for me.”

 

“ _You will burn, interloper, like all before you!_ ”

 

All? That sounded strange. “Did  _you_  drive out the Lizalfos outside?” she called out, curious.

 

The Lizalfos cocked its head such that only one of its eyes was visible to her. It conveyed a sense of madness, truth be told. “ _Unworthy! All unworthy, only I, only the Star!_ ”

 

So probably.

 

Then it began winding its staff up for another fireball toss, and Zelda began a motion to dodge, only to abort it abruptly when the Lizalfos seemed to adjust its aim. She was gratified by the fireball landing where she  _would_  have been, rather than where she was. The Lizalfos opened its mouth and hissed, and with a tingle from the green coin Zelda found herself quite certain it was the Lizalfos equivalent of a sneer, tinted with frustration.

 

“ _Blood of the mountain! I beseech thee!_ ”

 

The magma rumbled ominously. Oh  _no_. Zelda looked about the room -but she couldn't find anywhere to hide. Could she disrupt the wards?  _Should_  she disrupt them? The Lizalfos was probably protecting itself... with the robe, most likely... but it was  _floating_  up there and she couldn't reach it!

 

For lack of any better ideas, she grabbed a chunk of stone, a corner that had fallen away from one of the bricks making up the walls, and hurled it with her currently unoccupied sword arm. It didn't even hit the Lizalfos' dangling tail. Zelda had never been very good at ball games as a child...

 

“ _Come to me! Punish this heathen!_ ”

 

Magma began bubbling upward toward the Lizalfos.

 

“I don't suppose you'd let me out if I agreed to convert to your religion?”

 

The Lizalfos blinked in a peculiar pattern the tingle told her meant it was offended. Not surprising.

 

Zelda turned to face the shield. “I don't suppose you can block magma.”

 

Damning silence. Of course.

 

The magma made its way to the Lizalfos, which began making ecstatic sounds she really wished the tingle would stop translating. Ew. She did not need to know that. It bubbled and roiled and climbed its way up the Lizalfos, extending and darkening until finally there was a vast black Lizalfos, red light pouring from the gaps, hanging in the air, holding a massive sword of obsidian. Oddly, it was dusted with bright white points of light.

 

This seemed like overkill to Zelda, who had already been quite certain she couldn't harm the crazed thing.

 

Then it dropped and landed, and Zelda  _blinked_. Noooo. It  _couldn't_  have been so stupid as to  _cede the high ground_  and bring itself within reach of her sword. That was  _insanity_.

 

Then Zelda recalled her earlier thoughts vis-a-vis insanity, religious fanatics. Right. Never mind. Mystery solved.

 

The massive golem-body opened its mouth to hiss at her, most likely for melodramatic and/or thematic reasons. Or possibly to vent some of the insane heat it was giving off. That was plausible. In any event, Zelda ran up to it and stabbed it in one of its magma-red eyes, less because it seemed a good idea and more because she'd resigned herself to doing something stupid and/or dying.

 

Shockingly, it clutched at the eye in question with a pained screech, rearing upward, the sword smoothly sliding out as it pulled away in a manner no normal sword would do with normal stone. Zelda glanced at the Blade of Evil's Bane in no small amount of surprise, and the Blade in response all but radiated smugness. Then she focused on the 'wounded' eye as the golem-body's arms came away, revealing that the eye was now pitch black in an all-devouring, no-light-allowed manner, never mind how the bright red cracks around it were vividly glowing with red light.

 

“ _ **You will pay dearly for what you dare bring to this holy place, shadow,**_ ” the massive thing said. Fascinating construction, though Zelda questioned the priorities of whoever had designed this work.

 

She danced off to one side, the side that had a 'blind' eye. Which... was actually blind, going by how the golem-body was keeping the  _other_ eye on her as best as it could, as it lined up to stab at her. Zelda decided to not question her good fortune -and ignore how the feeling of smugness from the sword seemed to intensify momentarily,  _surely_  she was imagining it- and abruptly sped up and then immediately changed her direction to run under it. The thing over-corrected, sword slamming down somewhere over where she'd been moving, and she stopped for a moment to stab at the back of the heels, where a vital tendon would be if this were an animal. Which it wasn't, and this was stupid-

 

Zelda was forced to throw herself past the thing, coming  _uncomfortably_  close to the edge of the magma pit, as the golem-body screeched in agony and dropped abruptly, left leg no longer supporting its weight.

 

-okay. Zelda mentally threw her hands up in the air. Whoever had designed this was a master of their craft and an utter lunatic. Fine. She could work with that. She stabbed at the tail, missed, and then remembered how close she was to the magma pit and began circling around to the golem-body's front, which was rather lucky as it turned out the Lizalfos had decided to  _deliberately_  drop, sliding into the pit, which would have killed her in at least three ways if she'd remained there.

 

While it would be  _nice_  if falling into the pit of magma would kill it, Zelda didn't find it terribly likely. Instead, she backed even further away from the pit, half-expecting it to leap back out, spraying magma everywhere. To her surprise, it instead  _climbed_  back out, slow and agonizing. As a result, Zelda was able to see the 'wounded eye' was still pitch black-

 

“ _ **What did you do, what did you DO!?**_ ” it shouted in outrage, free hand clutching at the damaged eye, sounding utterly disbelieving.

 

-she glanced at the Blade again.  _Useful_.

 

Now she just needed to finish the job.

 

She was  _not_  going to get close to the golem-body while it was still pulling itself up out of the magma, though. Wards or no, she could see clumps of magma being pulled up and out as it climbed, and she refused to risk being splashed with the stuff, especially since she could  _feel the heat increasing from here_. It was a relief, in a way, that the golem-body seemed to be drawing the stuff inside of it, not to mention a possible explanation for why it had gone in in the first place. Likely it had expected the dip to repair the damage she'd done.

 

So naturally the golem-body's tail was still dangling in the magma when it lunged forward, flinging globs of superheated material in her general direction as it pulled loose. Oddly, it tried to simultaneously stab at her and take a bite, with the overall result being it instead slammed to the ground awkwardly in front of her.

 

Whereupon she stabbed the other 'eye'.

 

It shrieked, sounding more outraged than wounded, and swiped the golem-body's head to one side. Zelda's intuitive expectation was that the sword would be pulled from her grip, stuck as it was in the 'eye', but instead it remained in her hand and pulled loose from the 'eye', just as before. Zelda found herself begrudgingly giving the blade some respect; whoever ( _what_ ever?) had originally made the blade had been skilled beyond compare.

 

It was fortunate that she'd not been closer, as well, else she might have been hit, herself, by the thing's head. That would not have ended well. As was, she had felt the thing's 'breath' wash over her, outrageously hot. It would probably be unbearable if she weren't in her labwear, which only left her head and ankles exposed. As was she still found herself flinching, shield-arm going up to protect her face from the heat.

 

Then she backed away -and fairly promptly hit the wall. Still, the golem-body's 'eyes' actually did seem to function as eyes, and the Master Sword blackening them seemed to actually have blinded it, as it flailed and shrieked in an aimless way, clearly unable to see her even when its dead eyes passed over her. Its wild flailing was  _going_  to hit her at some point, though, and the fact that it was as chaotic as it was made it difficult for Zelda to ascertain the best time to strike, or even a halfway  _decent_  time to strike.

 

Girahim had not opportunistically struck out anywhere in this time, either, it occurred to her. Zelda was unsure if this was preference or limitation, but she suspected that either way it had to do with the golem-body's lack of proper blood. (Though only now did it occur to Zelda that it didn't spurt magma when stabbed, which would have made this quite impossible. Odd that it didn't, really. It made her wonder what this was  _intended_  for, originally)

 

This didn't really leave her with many options. Maybe something in one of her  _pockets_  could help, but she was in no position to be digging around in there and frankly it was  _rather difficult to concentrate_  on anything else when the reptilian monstrosity was flailing in front of her.

 

Then it stopped, all at once, and pulled itself up, head slowly turning, surprisingly quiet. The only sounds were the burbling of the magma and Zelda's own breathing, itself somewhat ragged. Odd.

 

Abruptly it lunged in a random direction, sword coming down on nothing Zelda could see, a triumphant cry escaping its mouth. Then a hiss of disappointment when the sword simply hit stone, chipping the stone and flakes of obsidian spraying from the sword. It limped, free hand occasionally hitting the ground to take the place of the foot whose 'tendon' had been cut, and went very quiet again.

 

…  _ah._  It was  _listening_  for her, now.

 

Could she  _leverage_  that? Why yes, she could. Simply grab one of the loose pieces of rock or brickwork and hurl it somewhere else. But first she needed to work out what her aim was. How to render the golem-body 'dead'. If stabbing out its eyes hadn't worked, it seemed unlikely the thing had a 'brain' that was necessary to function, as the eyes were by far the most direct route to the brain in most every animal Zelda had ever dissected. Or perhaps it  _did_  and simply placed it elsewhere, either way. The point was that stabbing it in the head was liable to be fruitless. So she wouldn't waste her time on that.

 

So... body strikes?

 

No, wait.

 

The arms. Deny it its sword.

 

She needed to... lure it out? Bait it into attack? Perhaps sneak up on it, oh-so-carefully. Arrange to get a clear shot at the joints, regardless.

 

The golem-body was stalking about still, head tilting back and forth. Zelda kept expecting it to sniff aloud for her, but no. Strange how it was so life-like and yet lacked that capability, particularly given that it  _had_  'nostrils'. Zelda found herself wondering if the spell simply attempted to imitate the form of its caster or if it had been designed in this shape specifically. The missing sense of smell might suggest the original creator lacked one, or considered it a lower priority... hmm. That might actually be  _consistent_  with Gorons having created this temple...

 

Zelda was brought out of her musings by the golem-body lunging, its sword coming down on an innocuous stretch of ground. Right. She was in a fight.

 

The golem-body hissed angrily, and Zelda took the noise cover provided to step a bit closer, carefully, quietly. The only thing she was reasonably confident about was that she needed to get close, so she might as well. Also that getting close was insanely dangerous. But truthfully she'd probably collapse in this heat long before the golem-body wound down, so the pressure was on her to attack regardless.

 

She wondered for a moment why the Lizalfos had stopped speaking. It had spoken from the golem-body before... perhaps its newfound silence was just part of trying to listen for Zelda?... hard to say. Zelda shuffled closer, slowly, carefully. At least her boots were relatively quiet, when she stepped carefully. The golem-body's eyes narrowed -odd, given they'd been destroyed- and it struck  _high_ , swinging at where the ceiling and wall met. Ah? Did it think Zelda could climb like some kind of... monkey? Hm. Perhaps it imagined her capable of quiet flight, as the Lizalfos itself had displayed prior to generating the golem-body. In that case...

 

With painstaking care Zelda leaned down to pick up a rock. Once she had it, she straightened just as slowly. From there she tossed the rock up, toward a high part of the wall. Her arm was not as good as, say, Link's, but it still came close enough, and the golem-body jerked and lunged toward the sound with a hiss. Zelda, meanwhile, took the opportunity to come running up from the side.

 

Things happened  _fast_ , too fast for Zelda to follow properly, but she found herself with her shield arm broken and her sword plunged deep into the side of the 'chest' of the golem-body.

 

Then the pain caught up with her.

 

On the plus side, the golem-body was thrashing and shrieking.

 

One the minus side, it was thrashing. While she was right next to it.

 

She jerked once, twice, thrice on the sword, half-aware of a darkness spidering its way across the surface of the golem-body, and then the arm nearby clipped her on the head, knocking her to the ground. Her vision doubled and her shield-arm was shrieking in pain and she felt nauseous from the pain and there was a terror there that the body would trample her and the  _blasted_  sword hadn't come loose at all, damn and drat its inconsistency, and the only good news was that the Lizalfos was more focused on the sword than on her.

 

“ _ **I disbelieve! I DISBELIEVE! Your illusion will not trick me!**_ ”

 

Zelda slotted that away somewhere in her mind, unsure why the Lizalfos believed she had cast an illusion upon it. She'd never bothered with such, viewing them as trivial toys for entertainers. For the moment though, she was focused on getting herself  _away_  from the Lizalfos' thrashing golem-body. With one arm broken and the other... the hand pounded with pain but it seemed to be in working condition. So she used the sword-arm to push herself to a crouch, gritting her teeth and pressing her eyes shut as the broken arm twisted in disturbing ways and jammed knives of pain into her, and awkwardly clambered away. She  _felt_  more than heard a  **thump**  from behind her, and had to fight down panic at the not-entirely-baseless conviction she'd only barely avoided being flattened.

 

Then her arm failed her and she hit the ground face-first, loose bits of stone grinding into her cheeks and chin. A lesser pain than the one in her broken arm, more insult than injury. That thought  _pushed_  her to lurch back to her feet, heedless of the pain and nausea, and twist to look back upon the golem-body.

 

It was still in largely the same place it had been, sword stuck in its side, still scrabbling at the sword with an arm not built to bend that way. A weakness in modeling your constructs  _too_  closely on a living creature. The construct almost certainly  _could_  bend further, in pure mechanical terms, but it was operating in imitation of a Lizalfos' form and so inherited their limitations. Its panic was very understandable, as the shadowy tendrils growing from the Blade of Evil's Bane were overtaking its form and seemed to be  _binding_  it. Its legs were locked together, and the left arm seemed barely able to move its shoulder. The  _right_  arm was relatively free to move, but struggled to get past the left arm, as well as to turn far enough to reach the sword at all. A Hylian might have reached somewhat awkwardly behind their back, but this appeared to be an option denied the Lizalfos by its body.

 

Zelda reconsidered her fury-filled plans to return to the fight. The Master Sword seemed to have the situation thoroughly handled...  _somehow_... and standing was... was...

 

Zelda turned and puked in the general direction of the lava pit.

 

Then puked again when the smell roiled back into her face, made abominable by the heat.

 

… as she was thinking beforehand, the Master Sword seemed to have things in hand. No reason to put herself unnecessarily into danger. She returned to watching, wishing she'd had the foresight to bring one of her analytical tools. The mechanics underlying this would surely be fascinating! (Zelda winced when she leaned forward in her excitement, jostling the arm, and made more of an effort to still herself)

 

The Lizalfos was shrieking incoherently this entire time, of course, but Zelda had quite tuned it out some time ago. Mostly it was indignant, with unoriginal commentary on her ancestry. Quite inaccurate, too; it had been her great-grand _father_  who had been a paramour for seemingly every man in Hyrule, thank you very much. Much more interesting was puzzling out the tendrils increasingly binding the golem-body. For instance, Zelda had initially assumed the Blade had utilized some mysterious sense to understand the space the tendrils moved through, but on closer inspection the tendrils searched about blindly, seemingly relying solely on touch. Zelda also noticed the Blade could only maintain four 'active' tendrils at once, a tendril darkening, stiffening, and then severing itself from the Blade before a new grew from the same position. All from the hilt, she noted as well.

 

Zelda began reciting notes under her breath, a technique she found useful for aiding recollection down the line.

 

Then she grew impatient watching the Blade tying up an essentially helpless monstrosity of stone. “Some of us have lives to get back to, you know!” she called out through cupped hands. Then she startled, as she noticed the broken arm was no longer broken, and Girahim the shield was in a quite sorry state. “Why thank you, oh considerate Girahim. Don't worry, you'll get your blood.” The reader dare not insinuate that she  _cooed_  at Girahim.

 

The Blade, meanwhile, seemed to assume an air of wounded dignity. Zelda ignored that feeling, in favor of tapping one foot impatiently, waiting for it to be done. She really was starting to feel faint in the heat, regardless of the competency of the protections, and she wasn't going to brook disrespect and time-wasting from an  _inanimate object_.

 

Alas, the Blade seemed more inclined to complete this binding than to oblige her sense of impatience. It remained an intriguing process, if nothing else.

 

Finally, the Blade sort of... fell out unceremoniously, seemingly pulled by gravity by virtue of the golem-body having fallen on its side leading to the Blade being angled downward. Zelda wasn't fooled at all, rolling her eyes at the Blade's lacking acting.

 

Then it occurred to her that she'd never met an enchanted object sophisticated enough to  _fail to act well_ , and found herself faintly disturbed.

 

She pushed it aside and stepped carefully over, still sore even though she was no longer  _crippled_ , and picked up the Blade. It felt no different than it had earlier, cool to the touch and still cloaked in that light-eating effect, seeming neither weaker for having done something so impressive, nor stronger for having subdued so great a working.

 

Then the golem-body exploded.

 

It took a good twenty seconds for Zelda to open her eyes, her instincts convinced that she really ought to be dead. But no, there was just the Lizalfos -still wearing its robes, but no longer glittering- and the fading glimmer of far-off stars dotting the air. Also, a white-gray material resembling smoke was diffusing, though it couldn't possibly  _be_  smoke, given she wasn't hacking up a lung from breathing the stuff. Curious.

 

Zelda put the Blade into a guard position, Girahim at the ready as well... and the Lizalfos began acrobatically dancing about in a manner her tingly coin convinced her to be an act of great joy and/or gratitude.

 

… okay.

 

After a moment, the Lizalfos seemed to recollect itself, and ran up to Zelda, its eyes curled in a manner the coin tingling convinced her conveyed happiness. Her actual gut instinct was that it was eyeing her like a slab of juicy meat, but she ignored that gut instinct. She'd talked to Tokay traders before, regardless of Link's insistence he should handle such errands. Getting used to Tokay stealing minor valuables as a sign that you were welcomed into the community was much harder than ignoring an irrational gut feeling. Especially since the Tokay had very different ideas of what constituted 'minor valuables' than she did.

 

Then it spoke.  _“Salutations and gratitude, stranger. I thank you on behalf of the Temple Guardian, They Who Warm Our Souls, for freeing us from the depredations of the Star.”_

 

Zelda stared for a moment at the religious lunatic Lizalfos. After a moment, her gaze slid to the Blade of Evil's Bane, a sword which very definitely did exist and signs were increasingly pointing to it actually being a construction of the Goddesses, or at least some being so beyond mortal folk as to make the distinction essentially pointless. Then her gaze slid back to the religious lunatic Lizalfos.

 

She nodded to herself once. Right then. Just assume the religious lunatic Lizalfos is  _not_  a lunatic. In that case, the most important question becomes... “What Star do you speak of, er, sir?”

 

The Lizalfos' tail undulated in a manner the green coin conveyed to her was the Lizalfos equivalent of rolling your eyes at an incredibly stupid baby. Zelda decided she didn't like the tone of this green coin thing, and found herself wondering how creative it was being in its translations.  _“I be a woman, Hylian boy.”_

 

…

 

Okay, Zelda was a big enough woman to admit she deserved that.

 

Then the Lizalfos waved that entire topic off. “ _The Star! It was..._ ” It -she- trailed off, seeming to struggle with the words.  _“Inside my head, whispering to me, changing how I saw things. It was not complete, it could not make me accept those **thugs**  as allies-” _Here, she spat in a very Hylian gesture of disgust to one side. Not the side with the lava pit, Zelda noted. Consistent with the religious... not-lunacy... Zelda found herself realizing she was going to need a new phrase to describe these people. Drat.  _“-but it could make me think a wandering stranger must needs be a thief here to loot and pillage. I was able to fight the fog somewhat, to fight less well, to unleash the Guardian so you might have a chance against me-”_ Oh. So she'd been  _deliberately_  stupid. Zelda appreciated the world making some sense again, but was a bit disappointed to realize her survival hadn't really had anything to do with her own skills. “ _-but no more than that until your magic sword cleansed the dust off of me._ ”

 

So the dust was some kind of  _control_  mechanism?

 

Zelda re-affirmed her mental note to capture some in a bottle at a later date, see if she could study the stuff.

 

Zelda nodded in acknowledgment, and then changed the subject. “I don't suppose you know if any of the Moblins was carrying someone's soul. It would most likely have been a black marble, no larger than my thumb, or perhaps a head-sized ball of clear glass containing a Poe railing against it?”

 

The Lizalfos cocked its head, so much like a bird.  _“I did not leave the Temple, personally. If this is truly important to you, I can commune with They Who Warm Our Souls. They would be more likely to answer a soul-related question successfully.”_

 

Zelda hesitated at the idea of taking advice from a Lizalfos that listened to the voices in its head, but then her gaze went to the Blade again, followed by the so far rather helpful Girahim, and eventually nodded in acknowledgment. Then, wiping some sweat from her brow, she asked, “I don't suppose there's a less blazingly hot place for me to rest in while you... do that... miss?”

 

The Lizalfos seemed surprised at the idea someone might want to be somewhere cooler. Lunatic. Nonetheless, she waved open the door she'd closed earlier, and then gave Zelda directions to a room that was 'particularly poor in the flows'.  Zelda thanked the Lizalfos, headed off (Unsurprisingly, it was down the tunnel that hadn't collapsed -Zelda did her best to step around the new Moblin corpses she found on the way, still remembering her earlier worries that perhaps some of the Moblins had an infection or some such), and was pleasantly surprised to find that... while it was still  _too warm_ , it was a tolerable too warm. Unpleasant, but not a risk of stroke.

 

Zelda most certainly did not collapse into a relieved heap onto an ugly stone cot. Don't entertain such an absurd thought.

 

What she  _did_  do was take advantage of what turned out to be blazing-hot running water flowing downward in one corner to get the worst of the gore and ash and etcetera out of the sturdier portions of her clothing.

 

Fortunately, not long after she'd finished that work and begun to shift restlessly, dimly remembering her promise to the Skulltula in particular, the Lizalfos priestess or suchlike returned. A tingling sensation overruled Zelda's immediate conviction that the Lizalfos' lolling tongue was ridiculous, somehow causing it to seem apologetic instead.

 

“ _They Who Warms Our Souls tells me that they cannot find your soul for you. It is concealed behind blinding protections that burn the spiritual eye, and They Who Warms Our Souls is now recovering from the effort.”_ Something about the way it held itself conveyed barely-concealed disapproval.  _“In gratitude for freeing They Who Warms Our Souls, however, we also searched for the nearest physical anchor for these protections. Perhaps that will be useful to you.”_ Having said that, the Lizalfos handed Zelda a small bone, whittled at one end to a point, dangling from... some kind of thread Zelda didn't recognize. Still, it was the same basic idea as her own tool for triangulating power, Zelda was fairly sure. She eyed it somewhat dubiously, but experimentation showed that it pointed quite consistently somewhere.... well, back out of this mess, so East.

 

Before Zelda could extricate herself-

 

“ _They Who Warms Our Souls also told me to grant you this, in gratitude.”_

 

The priestess or whatever was holding out what looked rather a  _lot_  like the green coin she'd been given at the Temple of Time in basic design. It was a yellow-orange color, its edge marked with the word for 'burning' in an endless loop, and the design in the center was another complicated set of images. Zelda was not terribly surprised that fires seemed to be a recurring element of the design, but there were also... Lizalfos? Dodongos? Something reptilian, the designs too small to readily say  _what_  in particular.

 

Hesitantly, she took the object from the priestess' hand and-

 

_cool_

 

-found herself abruptly  _okay_  with the temperature. She glanced up sharply, but the world around her was unchanged. She could see the air ripple in the distance still, in particular... yet she was already ceasing to sweat, no longer struggling to avoid panting in the heat.

 

_Interesting._

 

Stowing her new acquisition in one of her more secure pockets, Zelda bowed politely as best as she could, stiff and tired as she was, offered thanks that was rather more earnest than she'd actually intended it to be, and from there made her way back outside.

 

It was a surprisingly pleasant walk.

 

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Fortunately, no Moblins sprung from the ashes, and the Keese seemed even less interested in Zelda now. The fact that she spotted several trapped on the ground by their bulging bellies suggested an explanation, but Zelda waved it off mentally. Indeed, the only topic of real interest prior to reaching the outside at last was realizing that the  _Keese_  were the 'distant' voices she'd been hearing before. (A point she went back to resolutely ignoring. A horse was already absurd, a Skullwalltula ridiculous, but Keese brains were  _far too tiny to contain real thoughts!_ ) Once she was outside...

 

“Hey there! Are you done? Am I leaving now?”

 

… she was reminded anew of her deal with Gap-Tooth the Skullwalltula. Right. Yes. Passage there and back, in exchange for moving the... thing... somewhere else.

 

In spite of her better judgment, Zelda heaved a tremendous sigh and agreed that, yes, once she was on the other side the Skullwalltula would be coming with.

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

The Skullwalltula proved....  _twitchy_  on more normal ground, and it would've driven Zelda quite to distraction if she hadn't simply assigned the Doll to keep an eye on the thing until they found it some place it wouldn't immediately complain about being left at. Let the Doll deal with the Skullwalltula trying to climb its way to higher ground, even if that higher ground was a person.

 

Interestingly, 'Gap-Tooth' did not label the Doll 'food'. This was convenient, since it meant she didn't have to try to convince it to not bite the Doll. Zelda found herself wondering how Gap-Tooth could tell the Doll was no a flesh-and-blood creature... though she wasn't quite curious enough to suffer the indignity of  _asking_  it.

 

Zelda did her best to not engage with the Lizalfos camp, and was half-successful, inasmuch as many of the Lizalfos were somehow convinced that she had made their ancestral home theirs again. As such, something like half the village was quick to head off and start discussing how to get to the entryway without being eaten by the remaining Skullwalltula after  _very briefly_  thanking her as their prophesied hero (sigh), with the other half being primarily Lizalfos children for whom this camp  _was_  home. The brats elected to dance around Zelda instead, only leaving her alone when the village elder shooed them off, telling them to keep an eye on the Dodongos.

 

Zelda was offered food in gratitude, which she considered accepting until she was made aware it was Dodongo flesh, which was well-known to range from 'disgusting' to 'actively ruinous to one's health'. She politely declined, and instead brought out the whittled bone and asked for information on what might lie in the direction it pointed.

 

The elder seemed to startle in some indefinable way, and after a moment began speaking in the long, slow tone of someone delivering very bad news. “The Burning Wastes are the only thing of interest in that direction as far as we know.”

 

Zelda stared at the Lizalfos for a moment. The Burning Wastes had historically been a desert, ill-suited to supporting Hylian life but still populated throughout the ages, but sometime in the last thousand years the region had become volcanically active. The sand had mixed with sulfur, the hardy plants had died out while the animals fled or suffered the same, and the cultures that had persisted in the region for centuries had, to the best of anyone's awareness, been utterly wiped out.

 

Zelda politely thanked the village elder, went back to her wagon, checked the connections to the Temple of Time -and was startled to see that the connection to Death Mountain had vanished, what did that  _mean?_ \- and did her best to triangulate with the help of a map...

 

… and yes, it seemed rather likely that the Burning Wastes were, in fact, where the next-closest point of interest was, particularly since it apparently contained measures to  _block scrying on Link's soul_. Which, now that Zelda thought about it, was rather strong evidence his soul remained stolen, and left her confused anew as to why someone would  _care_  so much about her manservant's soul. Stealing it was already a lot of effort for little payoff, but going to such effort to ensure it could not be gotten back? This was not some opportunistic attack or something; whoever had taken Link's soul not only wanted to keep it but had anticipated people  _wanting_  to get it back, which was just absurd. Zelda and the farm harlot were the only two people who might  _want_  to get him back, Zelda was quite sure, and frankly Zelda had difficulty imagining an outsider believing Zelda would make the effort. They'd be wrong, of course, but Zelda knew something of her own reputation; most anyone who knew of her would be far more likely to assume she'd shrug and hire a replacement.

 

The whole thing was  _puzzling_ , and growing more puzzling as she learned more, rather than less.

 

Nonetheless, were Zelda still in this simply to retrieve her manservant's soul, this would be the end of our tale, aside a grim epilogue. Rather than face the Burning Waste's hurdles, she would have returned home, continued her work in peace while bemoaning how inferior an assistant the Doll was to Link, and met an untimely end when another, more cleverly-designed soulthief had snuck its way in to remove her as an obstacle.

 

Now, though, she had an inkling that whatever was going on had a more personal interest in her, an interest that would not go away if she kept to herself.

 

As such, she began traveling, the vague beginnings of a plan for how to  _survive_  in the Burning Wastes already percolating in her head...


End file.
